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Scent of a woman's tears lowers men's desire

What a downer! Men who smell a woman's tears experience a dip in both sexual arousal and testosterone, a new study finds. 

The libido-dampening effect occurred even when the men never saw the women cry and didn't know they were sniffing tears, researchers report online today (Jan. 6, 2011) in the journal Science.

The results are the first to suggest that humans can chemically communicate with tears.

"We conclude that there is a chemosignal in human tears, and at least one of the things the chemosignal does is reduce sexual arousal," study researcher Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, told LiveScience.

An odorless signal

It's obvious that humans communicate both verbally and visually, but recent research has shown that chemosignals also carry lots of information. Chemosignals may be entirely odorless - in Sobel's study, participants were unable to tell the difference between tears and saline solution - but they affect both behavior and physiology.

Earlier work by Sobel and others found that male sweat can boost mood and sexual arousal in women, as well as bumping up their levels of the stress hormone cortisol. And a 2004 study published in the journal Hormones and Behavior found that the scent of a lactating woman's nursing pads could increase sexual desire in other women.

Scientists have found that emotional tears contain more proteinthan do the everyday tears that protect the eyes. Until now, however, chemical signals in tears had been found only in mice and blind mole rats. To investigate the phenomenon in humans, Sobel and his colleagues put out fliers recruiting people who could cry easily. They got about 70 responses (only one of them from a man), he said. The researchers screened the volunteers and found the three best criers - women who could produce at least a milliliter of tears while watching a sad movie.

The researchers then had 24 men sniff both saline and the women's tears. Both the tears and saline had been allowed to roll down the women's cheeks, as a way to control for any odors in their skin or sweat.

None of the men could tell the difference between the two samples, and even the experimenter was kept in the dark about which she was presenting. The men then saw photos of women's faces, which they rated for sadness and sexual attractiveness. [Read Sexual Pheromones: Myth or Reality?]

"To our surprise, there was absolutely no influence on sadness or empathy or anything of that sort that we had expected," Sobel said. However, "sexual arousal dropped after sniffing tears."

Questions about crying

The researchers tried the experiment again, this time priming 50 male volunteers for sadness by showing them a depressing video clip. Again, sniffing tears instead of saline didn't make men sadder. But it did lower their sexual arousal and their testosterone levels.

As a final experiment, the researchers repeated the tear-sniffing with 16 men who were situated inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI). The fMRI shows patterns of blood flow in the brain, which coincide with brain activity.

Sure enough, the tears reduced activity in areas known to be involved in sexual arousal. Those areas included the hypothalamus, an almond-size structure just above the brainstem, and the left fusiform gyrus, which is on the surface of the left side of the brain.

The study was "very well done," said Charles Wysocki, a psychobiologist at the Monell Chemical Sense Center in Philadelphia.

"Tears contain proteins that are also found in the underarm," Wysocki told LiveScience. "And in the underarm they bind the chemicals that we think are involved with chemical communication, so it's quite possible that these proteins found in tears might be doing the same thing."

The finding is likely to remain controversial until researchers discover a specific chemical that causes the response, however. Sobel's lab is now working to identify the compound in tears that sends the signal.

"There's something that's operating at a very low concentration to cause this effect," George Preti, an organic chemist at the Monell Center who wasn't involved in the study, told LiveScience. "It's obviously a molecule with a lot of oomph."

The study also raises questions of whether children's and men's tears send signals, and what signals are conveyed within one's own gender by tears. Whether happy tears send a signal is another open question, Wysocki said.

"You can understand where women might not be aroused when they are, in fact, crying," Wysocki said. "And maybe they're telling the male, it's a chemical communication way of saying 'No' or at least 'Not now.' You can see that, it makes sense. But if doesn't make sense to have the same chemical signal being released when a guy gets back after a year of tour of duty and his wife greets him withtears of happiness and pleasure. I would speculate that those tears would be containing something else."

Given the newfound parallel between rodents and human tears, the idea that humans are the only mammals to cry emotional tears may be wrong, Sobel said.

"Human emotional tears were considered unique because they were considered purely an emotional response," he said. "But what we've shown is that they're a form of chemosignaling, at least in part, and that puts them on par with mice tears and mole-rat tears."

• New Theory for Why We Cry
• Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind
• Top 10 Things That Make Humans Special

men “don’t care” what a woman looks like naked

JULIA Roberts insists men “don’t care” what a woman looks like naked.

The actress — who’s married to Daniel Moder — was asked whether she agrees with her Eat, Pray, Lovecharacter, who says how you look naked doesn’t mean anything?

“Absolutely,” Roberts replied. “Men don’t care what a woman looks like naked.

“It’s more about, ‘There’s a naked woman here with me.’ And anyway, that’s what dimmer switches were made for!”


Roberts, 42, recently revealed she refuses to have plastic surgery — because she wants to grow old gracefully.
“I want my kids to know when I’m pissed, when I’m happy and when I’m confounded,” she told Elle magazine in its September issue.

“Your face tells a story and it shouldn’t be a story about your drive to the doctor’s office.”
“It’s unfortunate that we live in such a panicked, dysmorphic society where women don’t even give themselves a chance to see what they’ll look like as older persons. I want to have some idea of what I’ll look like before I start cleaning the slates,” she adds.




JULIA Roberts doesn’t worry about looking glamorous.
The Eat Pray Love actress — who has twins Hazel and Phinneaus, five, and three-year-old Henry with husbandDanny Moder – insists she is always too busy readying her family for the day to think about her appearance.

“When you’ve got four people to get dressed to get out the door you don’t really tend to spend a lot of time on yourself,” she said.
However, the 42-year-old actress — who is the face of French cosmetic company Lancome — insists she has never been too concerned about her looks.
“But that’s the way I roll anyway,” she said. “I was never one to do my hair and make-up just to go down to the market, so it’s really not that much different. If I get a little eye cream on I feel like I’m ahead of myself.”
And Julia revealed that she worries about the effects of using too many products or having beauty treatments.
“The body is a great machine and it knows how to take care of itself,” she said.
“I think more often than not the things we do to our skin or our bodies can hold it back from doing its proper job.”

Scent of a woman: Men's testosterone responses to olfactory ovulation cues

Scent of a woman: Men's testosterone responses to olfactory ovulation cues

Women around the world spend billions of dollars each year on exotic smelling perfumes and lotions in the hopes of attracting a mate. However, according to a new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, going "au natural" may be the best way to capture a potential mate's attention.

Smells are known to be critical to animal mating habits: Animal studies have shown that male testosterone levels are influenced by odor signals emitted by females, particularly when they are ovulating (that is, when they are the most fertile). Psychological scientists Saul L. Miller and Jon K. Maner from Florida State University wanted to see if a similar response occurs in humans. In two studies, women wore tee shirts for 3 nights during various phases of their menstrual cycles. Male volunteers smelled one of the tee shirts that had been worn by a female participant. In addition, some of the male volunteers smelled control tee shirts that had not been worn by anyone. Saliva samples for testosterone analysis were collected before and after the men smelled the shirts.

Results revealed that men who smelled tee shirts of ovulating women subsequently had higher levels of testosterone than men who smelled tee shirts worn by non-ovulating women or men who smelled the control shirts. In addition, after smelling the shirts, the men rated the odors on pleasantness and rated the shirts worn by ovulating women as the most pleasant smelling.

The authors note that "the present research is the first to provide direct evidence that olfactory cues to female ovulation influence biological responses in men." In other words, this study suggests that testosterone levels may be responsive to smells indicating when a woman is fertile. The authors conclude that this biological response may promote mating-related behavior by males.

What are your top favourite movies of all time?

I have so many and cannot decide which one is my most fav of all the times...
Here is my short list:
The Piano * 9 1/2 Weeks * Nell * The Holiday * An Affair to Remember * Gone with a Wind * Notebook * Rain Man * Scent of a Woman * Julie and Julia * Duplicity *