Regardless of your gender, tears can have a powerful effect on you. Everyone knows that they can spark reactions of sympathy, sadness and caring, but did you know they can affect your sexual wellness and wellbeing?
When it comes to female tears, new research has shown that there could be a certain smell that is associated with these tears, a smell of sadness if you will, which could cause a loss of male libido.
The research was done by scientists looking into why tears elicit feeling of compassion in others, and the results were published in the journal ‘Science’ recently. Surprisingly, the scientists found that the effects were not purely visual.
Researchers found that visual stimuli such as facial expressions, tears and sadness did have an effect, when it came to men it was actually the smell of tears that affected them. The smell of tears actually directly caused a reduction in testosterone levels in men, and it also caused a reduction in activity in the areas of the brain responsible for sexual arousal.
Tears, of course, have no detectable odour, which has led scientists to speculate that they must contain a chemical which causes the lack of libido. The tests were done both with and without visual stimuli (i.e. the sight of a woman crying) and the effects were the same in both cases, indicating that it was not simply the visual image of a sad woman that caused a man to be put off the idea of sex, but the actual smell of the tears.
Men were asked to smell tears of female donors, interspersed with samples which were simply plain salt water, and the lack of libido and sexual excitement only occurred when they were smelling the tears, not when they were interacting with the salt water, which strongly indicates a chemical element at work.