Ever wondered why the sight of someone turning on the waterworks leaves you feeling like you’ve stepped on a piece of Lego in the dark?
It’s not just you; tears have a knack for turning a room’s vibe from “just chillin’” to “awkward city”. Let’s take a dive into this pool of saltwater sentiments and figure out why we all become squirmy worms when the teardrops start falling.
First up, the cry conundrum. Tears are like the emotional equivalent of those little flags you put on a mailbox.
They pop up when there’s something inside that needs to be delivered – be it sadness, joy, frustration, or even that feeling you get when you can’t decide what to order for dinner.
They’re a signal, saying: “Hey, I’ve got feelings here, and I need to share them!”
When someone else starts crying, our brains do a little dance of discomfort. Why?
In a surprising twist on the science of tears, a new study, published on December 21 in the public journal PLOS Biology, reveals that a woman’s tears contain chemicals that may tame aggression in men.
The groundbreaking research, orchestrated by Shani Agron from Israel’s esteemed Weizmann Institute of Science, suggests that merely sniffing a woman’s emotional tears can lead to a calmer demeanour in men, reducing their aggressive impulses.
This research builds on previous knowledge from the animal kingdom, where it has long been observed that male rodents become less aggressive when exposed to the scent of female tears.
But it’s more than just a curiosity among critters — Agron’s study suggests humans may work the same way.
Sceptical? Consider the study’s process, which was ingenious and meticulous. A group of unsuspecting men were exposed to women’s tears and a plain saline solution, but there was a catch – they couldn’t tell the difference since both were odourless.
While unknowingly inhaling thee substances, the men engaged in a specially designed two-player game programmed to provoke hostility, as the men were led to believe their opponent was cheating them.
The study aimed to test the calming ability of tears. In a scenario ripe for retaliation, the authors collected “emotional” tears from six female donors, which they exposed to men while they played a video game designed to provoke aggression.
In another experiment, the men played the game while in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, which measured their brain activity.
But wait, it gets even more scientific. When the researchers replicated their experiment inside an MRI scanner, they could peek into the human brain in real-time.
They found that two brain areas fuelling aggression, the prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula, lit up like fireworks when the men felt provoked –except when they got a whiff of the women’s tears.
In those cases, the typical neural fireworks display was significantly subdued.
Going solo, each man’s brain was a reliable aggressometer. The more those aggression-linked brain spots quietened down with tears, the less the men engaged in vengeful tactics during the game.
The study found that men displayed 43.7% fewer aggressive behaviours after smelling the women’s tears, compared to men who smelled a control solution. The brain imaging experiments found that sniffing tears reduced brain activity in regions related to aggression.
“We’ve shown that tears activate olfactory receptors and that they alter aggression-related brain circuits, significantly reducing aggressive behaviour,” said lead author Noam Sobel, of the Weizmann Institute Department of Neurobiology in Israel, in a statement.
The authors said the findings meant tears were a “chemical blanket offering protection against aggression and that the effect is common to rodents and humans, and perhaps to other mammals as well”, Sobel said in a statement
Agron and the team’s findings are more than a quirky piece of trivia; they imply that human tears might be a part of a complex communication system that helps regulate social behaviour, much like that seen in our animal friends.