Credits: Social Media
Study finds bizarre secret to why men feel less aggressive when a woman cries
Have you ever been in an argument and started to feel less aggressive when someone cried? Thats not just empathy, its biochemistry.
Navigating how to act in an argument when a female family member or spouse starts to cry is tricky; how quickly do you abandon your defense and try to make amends as tears run down their face? Well, according to new research, theres a very bizarre reason why men might feel less aggressive around a crying woman and its a reason that we share with other mammals too.
Scientists claim they know why men feel less aggressive when a woman cries
Its long been known that mammals use various bodily media like sweat, urine, or feces to share information with one another; its how many animals know when its time to mate, for example.
Yet out of all the bodily media that have been researched, weve had little-to-no understanding of how social chemical signalling works in regard to human tears until now.
According to the results of a new study published in PLOS Biology, the reason why men feel less aggressive when a woman cries is because he is smelling a specific chemical composition that causes an overlap in the brain’s mechanisms between olfaction and aggression.
This comes from a team of researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science who set up an interesting two-player game that was designed to elicit aggressive behavior.
In the game, participants were led to believe that the other player had cheated the rules before being given the option to get revenge on their opponent, causing them to lose money.
Throughout the experiment, some of the male players were smelling a womans tears, whilst others were simply smelling an odorless saline.
They found that when participants were sniffing female tears, male players were less likely to express overtly aggressive behavior and revenge-seeking dropped by more than 40%.
We found that sniffing tears increased functional connectivity between the neural substrates of olfaction and aggression, reducing overall levels of neural activity in the latter.
The scientists then repeated the experiments in an MRI scanner, finding that two parts of the brain associated with aggression showed less activity when smelling female tears than when sniffing the saline.
We found that just like in mice, human tears contain a chemical signal that blocks conspecific male aggression. This goes against the notion that emotional tears are uniquely human, said the authors.
The neuroanatomical overlap between olfaction and aggression places olfactory stimuli in a privileged brain setting for modulation of aggression. This is well known in rodents and even insects, and our results imply the same in humans.
The researchers also suggested that this could be a mammalian-wide mechanism, meaning it could be the same situation for your pet dog or cat.
So, if you want to elicit a little more sympathy in an argument or want to calm down a potentially aggressive family member or spouse, it might be a good idea to let a tear or two show.
