New study: Women's tears contain pheromones that turn men off

 

Female tears affect men's desire. Photo: wikimedia commons

An old friend told me once that she intentionally cries in conversations with her husband when she's not getting her way.  She might want to consider a different tactic.  New evidence suggests that a pheromone in women's tears turns men off rather decidedly.

Two researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have just published a study in the journal Science which demonstrates that the tears of human females turn men off.

Tears contain pheromones, apparently
The researchers, Shani Gelstein and Noam Sobel, have apparently shown that human female tears contain a pheromone that reduces men's sexual arousal.  A pheromone is a chemical produced by the body that communicates with others of the same species. For example, female dogs in heat have a scent that attracts males. Males of many species have a scent in their urine, or in glandular secretions, that advertises the boundaries of their territories and keeps competitors out.  Pheromones are very common among other mammals but have seldom (if ever) been identified in humans.

It's interesting that, in this experiment, the subjects could not consciously smell the pheromone. But they apparently smelled it subconsciously, because it affected their behavior.


Women's tears dampened men's sexual response
I thought the experiment was ingenious.  The researchers collected a jar of tears from women as they watched sad film clips and tears trickled down their faces. A pad containing either tears or a salt solution that had been trickled down the same faces was then attached to each male subject's upper lip.  Neither substance had a perceptible odor.  The men were then shown female faces; 17 of the 24 men found the female faces less alluring after whiffing tears than after whiffing salt solution.

Another 50 men showed less physiological sexual arousal after whiffing tears than after whiffing salt solution. Low sexual arousal was indicated by slow breathing rates and low levels of testosterone in their saliva.

In a final experiment, men watched a sad movie while sniffing women's tears or sniffing a salt solution. The men sniffing tears showed a much reduced blood flow to areas of the brain that had earlier reacted strongly to an R-rated erotic movie.

The researchers don't know what the chemical nature of the pheromone might be.  More research is need to figure that out. 


How would the pheromones in women's tears affect other women?
I never have really felt that it was to my advantage to cry in front of a man. It might catch attention, might inspire guilt or pity, but I'm not sure it's ever really worked to my advantage. I'm curious to see the experiment repeated on female subjects.  How do females respond to whiffing the tears of other females? I imagine the response would be increased blood flow to the parts of the brain involved in care-taking, nurturing, and heart-felt sympathy.

What do you think?

Keywords: Shani Gelstein, Noam Sobel, pheromones in tears, women's tears, tears reduce sexual response

Why do girls fear snakes and spiders more? Does it start in infancy?

Text by Sally Kneidel, PhD, of sallykneidel.com
Photos by Alan Kneidel
See Alan's blog at http://goodbykneidel.blogspot.com 

 Photo of gopher snake by Alan Kneidel

I love snakes. Every time I take a walk around the neighborhood, I stop and examine every squashed snake carcass I see on the road, of which there are many. I lament the loss of every one of them.

My parents, on the other hand, killed every snake they saw when I was a kid, and called all of them "copperheads."  They were protecting us young'uns, or so they thought. I didn't realize how many people kill all snakes until I spent three years teaching elementary science.  I used to bring a lot of snakes in to show my students. Every single time I did this, a dozen hands would shoot up begging to make a comment.  And almost every single comment was "My daddy killed a snake last week with a shovel" or "My granddaddy chopped a snake in half in the garden."  No one ever said that a snake their family saw was a welcomed or even a tolerated sight. And all of the snakes were allegedly "copperheads." After awhile, I began my snake lessons by banning stories about family members killing snakes; I couldn't take it anymore.  It's a miracle that the U.S. has any remaining snakes at all. 

Why are we so afraid of snakes? As a person partial to snakes, I have little patience with it.

Are girls genetically primed to fear snakes?
I read recently an intriguing study about fear of snakes, published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. That study is the subject of this post.  Researcher David Rakison of Carnegie Mellon University looked at differences in the way 11-month-old humans react to pictures of snakes and spiders.  Specifically, he looked at differences between male and female children. His findings surprised me.  

Rakison showed pairs of images to the youngsters in his study.  First he paired either a happy or a fearful cartoon face with a snake, a spider, a flower, or a mushroom.  After that, Rakison timed how long each baby looked at new pairings of images that were different from the orignial pairings they had viewed. He wanted to see if the new pairings would seem odd to them and would cause them to look longer, out of puzzlement or curiousity.

Here's what Rakison found
Apparently the girls more readily associated the snake or spider with a fearful face. When the girls were subsequently shown a happy face with the snake or spider, they looked at it a long time (as if trying to make sense of something surprising).  With the little boys, no pairings of images were more interesting than any others. The boys did not find the snake or spider paired with a happy face surprising or interesting.

Photo of tarantula in Amazon rainforest by Alan Kneidel

Rakison said that this finding (if confirmed by other studies) indicates that human females have evolved an aversion to snakes and spiders. That trait evolved because women in our evolutionary history were in charge of protecting their children from the bites of snakes or spiders. Another study in Sweden found that snake and spider phobias are four times more common in women than in men.

Photo of black-tailed rattlesnake by Alan Kneidel

Not so fast...
says Vanessa LoBue of the University of Virginia. She disagrees with Rakison's findings. If girls gaze longer at the pairing of a snake with a smiling face, it's because 11-month-old girls are better at recognizing facial expressions than male babies, and therefore understand the pairings better. This understanding would account for their surprise and longer gazes.

LoBue offers evidence from her own studies that 5-year-old girls recognize threatening and nonthreatening expressions faster than boys. Do 11-month-old girls have that capacity too? We need to find out! What do you think?

Maybe women are squeamish because of gender stereotypes
I personally don't believe that girls are "primed" genetically to be more fearful of snakes and spiders. I think it's cultural, that little girls learn to act squeamish and fearful by watching older females. I believe women often behave as though they're fearful and vulnerable because that's the sexy female prototype that's been promoted by our Western culture since who knows when. Powerful fearless women are, in popular culture, not widely admired. That's changing slowly. But women are still encouraged (often very subtly) to appear helpless and afraid like Olive-Oyl, while Popeye eats his spinach and beats the tar out of Brutus. I agree with LoBue. Rakison's results can be explained by female children's acuity in reading human facial expressions.

Or maybe girls already been affected by cultural expectations for their gender, at the age of 11-months!

I would love to hear reader comments.

 Photo of a hunting spider in Bolivia by Alan Kneidel

Sources:
David Rakison. "Does women's greater fear of snakes and spiders originate in infancy?" Evolution and Human Behavior. Volume 30. November, 2009.

Bruce Bower. "Girls but not boys may be primed for arachnophobia, ophidiophobia: Fear of crawly, slithery things could begin before first birthday. Science News, September 26, 2009.

Babies cry in their native language....learned in the womb

Photo by Kathy Pintair of Ambient Photography

This post now a Google News Link and on Behavioral Health Central and on www.basilandspice.com.

Ever wonder if babies are listening and learning while they're in the womb?  Turns out they are, say researchers from the University of Wurzburg in Germany. Their observations were published online in the November issue of Current Biology.

The research team recorded more than a thousand cries from 30 French newborns and 30 German newborns. They then analyzed the melodic patterns of the cries to look for differences between the two groups. The researchers wondered if the cries had any resemblance to the speech patterns of the infants' mothers.

French and German adults have different patterns of intonation, some of which are easily identifiable. For example, the intonation of French speakers tends to rise at the end of words or phrases. The speech of Germans tends to fall at the end of words or phrases.

The newborns in the study, who were only 2-5 days old, cried in a melodic pattern that resembled their parents' language.  The French babies' cries tended to have a rising melody as does the French language.  The German infants' cries tended to have a falling melody like the German tongue. Because the infants were so young, the researchers inferred that they had learned the melodic patterns in the womb.

Scientists already knew that, in the final months of gestation, fetuses can hear people talking, especially their mothers. Previous studies have reported that newborns prefer the sound of their mothers’ voices to the voices of other people. Wermke, a member of the University of Wurzburg research team, believes that babies try to imitate their mothers’ behaviors and to mimic the musical structure of their mothers' words in order to attract her attention and foster bonding.  Earlier research by Fernald and Simon (see "Sources" below) has shown that infants even perceive the emotional content of their mothers' speech conveyed by intonation.

The first visible effort of infants to imitate the mother is the crying, with its falling or rising intonations. Later, the tendency to imitate vocalization is incorporated into babbling, Wermke proposes. From age 3 months on, infants begin to reproduce the vowel sounds they hear from adults.

What does this mean for parents of newborns?  Crying is not only a signal of distress, it's also a baby's effort to imitate mom in order to encourage attachment. Wermke says that parents should listen more carefully and appreciate the complexity of their babies' cries. "Crying is a language itself," she says, "and the baby is really trying to communicate with us by its first sounds already."

Key words:: human behavior infant crying infant bonding listening in the womb crying in native language

Sources:
Birgit Mampe, Angela D. Friederici, Anne Christophe and Kathleen Wermke
"Newborns' Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language"
Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 23, 11/5/2009

Fernald, A., and T. Simon. "Expanded intonation contours in mothers' speech to newborns." Developmental Psychology, Volume 20, 104–113. 1984.

Bruce Bower, "Newborns may cry in their mother tongues." Science News. 12/5/2009

Neil Greenfieldboyce. "Babies may pick up language cues in womb." National Public Radio. 11/6/2009