Women’s tears contain chemical cues

From Nature:

Tears shed by women contain chemical signals that decrease sexual arousal and testosterone levels in men, according to a study. The result, discovered by Noam Sobel, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his colleagues, is published today in Science¹.

The existence of pheromones — secreted or excreted chemical signals that produce a social response — in humans has been debated, although research has shown that human sweat communicates information about individual identity, genetic relatedness, emotional states and health status, says Denise Chen, who studies human olfaction at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Mouse tears contain sex-specific pheromones², but scientists have not previously demonstrated that human crying is a form of chemical signalling.

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