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Reminds me of the fact that female ducks have really complex vaginas to try to avoid getting raped (and it doesn't work).

Because dad says boys don’t cry.

If male tears were the only control, then they run the risk of not finding any result. If you have 3 groups, you need a substantially larger sample size because you are running a less powerful statistical test.

Easier to start with the test that's most likely to work, and narrow it down from there if you succeed

They said they had a hard time finding men who would cry.

They also didn't test women sniffing women's tears, or men sniffing men or women sniffing men, or animal tears.

They left a lot of variables out of this one.

I thought the same thing, so I checked the real paper and they do end up explaining their reasoning.

As for social interactions among humans, future research will explore whether the new study’s findings apply to women. “When we looked for volunteers who could donate tears, we found mostly women, because for them it’s much more socially acceptable to cry,” Agron says.

I'm interested if the results are same for male tears and also if they're the same for women who smell either gender's tears.

Uh, bottle the tears of women and throw them (the tears, not the women) on your male enemies?

Start fucking dropping tears en masse in chem trails across the country, maybe that'll help. They already think we do it anyway.

Now, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have conducted a series of experiments to investigate whether, like in rodents, sniffing human female tears reduces aggression in men and what functional effect it has on their brains.

“We knew that sniffing tears lowers testosterone and that lowering testosterone has a greater effect on aggression in men than in women, so we began by studying the impact of tears on men because this gave us higher chances of seeing an effect,” said Shani Agron, the lead and co-corresponding author of the study.

There’s limited evidence of human tear chemosignaling, but a previous study by some of the researchers involved in the current study found that women’s tears contain an odorless chemical signal that, when sniffed by males, reduced self-rated sexual arousal, physiological measures of arousal, and testosterone levels.

First, the researchers tested whether sniffing female tears reduced aggression in men. ‘Emotional’ tears were collected from six human donors aged 22 to 25 who watched sad film clips in isolation to induce crying. Twenty-five men were asked to play a two-person monetary game with an opponent they were told was human but was, in fact, a computer algorithm. The game was designed to elicit an aggressive response by the male toward their opponent, whom they were led to believe was cheating. When given the opportunity, the male could get revenge on their opponent by causing them to lose money with no personal gain to them.

Before playing the game, the participants sniffed either female tears or a saline solution – both are odorless – but were not told what they were sniffing. The researchers observed a 43.7% reduction in aggression following exposure to tears. To evaluate the robustness of their results, they ran a bootstrap analysis, a statistical procedure that resamples a single data set to create many simulated samples. The analysis found that the probability of obtaining this outcome by chance was 2.9%, suggesting that, like in rodents, chemosignals in human emotional tears have a primary aggression-blocking function.

Welcome to being an animal!

There's some crazy shit about our biology that affects how we think and act.

Can we do something to induce tears from women without causing any serious harm? Like tickling your feet with a feather duster or something? It just seems like the perfect thing to pour on Trump's head.

Your first statement is completely wrong.

PLOS Biology, the journal this article is published in, is founded in 2003, so hardly a new journal, and has an impact factor of ~9, which means that it IS a prestigious journal.

The only difference between a scientific experiment and screwing around is writing it down.

Chemical warfare at its finest.

Bloodhound Gang had it right; the lap dance really is better when the stripper's crying!

Well not to get dark. But if theres a domestic issue and man is abusing a woman to the point she is crying... And then the man calms down once she starts crying... Or maybe there's a really stressful situation and both partners are frustrated and the woman crys and the man some how bucks up - Maybe - I dunno. Weirder shit has been done. I'm not trying to say woman weak and do a cry. I dunno I'm not a tear doctor

As for why, imagine if they could isolate the compound that reduces aggression. It could be really useful for de-escalating violent situations.