Don't Cry or You'll Die Alone

January 7, 2011

Rheanna Sand

Listen up, women! Science has a very important message. DON'T CRY OR YOU'LL DIE ALONE. Or, at least, that's what I gather from the headlines. "Women's tears tank men's libido!" (LA Times), "A woman's tears are biggest turn-off for men!" (The Mirror), "Stop the waterworks, ladies. Crying chicks aren't sexy!" (MSNBC), and my personal favourite, "Lonely teardrops" (Science News)...all are trumpeting a strange study published in the January 6th issue of Science Express.

Emotional tears are a phenomenon unique to humans. This particular group of Israeli researchers figured there just HAD to be a reason for them, and seeing as how mice use tears to transmit social signals, they thought we might use them for a similar purpose. So they got two women to watch sad movies and literally collect their tears. The women also ran some salt water drops down their faces and collected them as a control.

Then the researchers made men smell the tears and salt water, and they couldn't tell the difference. But when the scientists put some of the tears on a pad under the men's noses, they had different responses to pictures of women and to... movies. They were less attracted to the women and had reduced testosterone. In other words, they practically turned gay.

Just look at what your tears are doing to your men, ladies...making them significantly less aroused at a p level less than 0.018! Do you ever want to be happy? Then stop crying. Or at least, don't let him smell your sadness. Keep it bottled up next to some saline instead.

_{Gelstein, S., Yeshurun, Y., Rozenkrantz, L., Shushan, S., Frumin, I., Roth, Y., & Sobel, N. (2011). Human Tears Contain a Chemosignal Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1198331}

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