TEARS of sadness contain a chemical turn-off for men, diminishing their sexual arousal by smell alone.
In a pilot experiment, Noam Sobel and colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, asked a group of men to sniff tears before filling out a mood questionnaire. “To our surprise, we found no change in the area of positive or negative mood, but there was a decrease in sexual arousal,” says Sobel.
To investigate further, Sobel’s team collected tears shed by two women watching sad movies. They then soaked small cotton pads in the tears, or in saline which had…
