> Emotional tearing is a poorly understood behavior that is considered uniquely human. In mice,
tears serve as a chemosignal. We therefore hypothesized that human tears may similarly serve a
chemosignaling function. We found that merely sniffing negative-emotion–related odorless tears
obtained from women donors induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of
women’s faces. Moreover, after sniffing such tears, men experienced reduced self-rated sexual
arousal, reduced physiological measures of arousal, and reduced levels of testosterone. Finally,
functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that sniffing women’s tears selectively reduced
activity in brain substrates of sexual arousal in men
https://sci-hub.tw/10.1126/science.1198331