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【科普】眼泪中的情绪信号
Emotional Signals Are Chemically Encoded in Tears, Researchers Find
ScienceDaily (Jan. 6, 2011) — Emotional crying is a universal, uniquely human behavior. When we cry, we clearly send all sorts of emotional signals. In a paper published online January 6 in Science Express, scientists at the Weizmann Institute have demonstrated that some of these signals are chemically encoded in the tears themselves. Specifically, they found that merely sniffing a woman's tears -- even when the crying woman is not present -- reduces sexual arousal in men.
Humans, like most animals, expel various compounds in body fluids that give off subtle messages to other members of the species. A number of studies in recent years, for instance, have found that substances in human sweat can carry a surprising range of emotional and other signals to those who smell them.
But tears are odorless. In fact, in a first experiment led by Shani Gelstein, Yaara Yeshurun and their colleagues in the lab of Prof. Noam Sobel in the Weizmann Institute's Neurobiology Department, the researchers first obtained emotional tears from female volunteers watching sad movies in a secluded room and then tested whether men could discriminate the smell of these tears from that of saline. The men could not.
In a second experiment, male volunteers sniffed either tears or a control saline solution, and then had these applied under their nostrils on a pad while they made various judgments regarding images of women's faces on a computer screen. The next day, the test was repeated -- the men who were previously exposed to tears getting saline and vice versa. The tests were double blinded, meaning neither the men nor the researchers performing the trials knew what was on the pads. The researchers found that sniffing tears did not influence the men's estimates of sadness or empathy expressed in the faces. To their surprise, however, sniffing tears negatively affected the sex appeal attributed to the faces.
To further explore the finding, male volunteers watched emotional movies after similarly sniffing tears or saline. Throughout the movies, participants were asked to provide self-ratings of mood as they were being monitored for such physiological measures of arousal as skin temperature, heart rate, etc. Self-ratings showed that the subjects' emotional responses to sad movies were no more negative when exposed to women's tears, and the men "smelling" tears showed no more empathy. They did, however, rate their sexual arousal a bit lower. The physiological measures, however, told a clearer story. These revealed a pronounced tear-induced drop in physiological measures of arousal, including a significant dip in testosterone -- a hormone related to sexual arousal.
Finally, in a fourth trial, Sobel and his team repeated the previous experiment within an fMRI machine that allowed them to measure brain activity. The scans revealed a significant reduction in activity levels in brain areas associated with sexual arousal after the subjects had sniffed tears.
Sobel said, "This study raises many interesting questions. What is the chemical involved? Do different kinds of emotional situations send different tear-encoded signals? Are women's tears different from, say, men's tears? Children's tears? This study reinforces the idea that human chemical signals -- even ones we're not conscious of -- affect the behavior of others."
Human emotional crying was especially puzzling to Charles Darwin, who identified functional antecedents to most emotional displays -- for example, the tightening of the mouth in disgust, which he thought originated as a response to tasting spoiled food. But the original purpose of emotional tears eluded him. The current study has offered an answer to this riddle: Tears may serve as a chemosignal. Sobel points out that some rodent tears are known to contain such chemical signals. "The uniquely human behavior of emotional tearing may not be so uniquely human after all," he says.
The work was authored by Shani Gelstein, Yaara Yeshurun, Liron Rozenkrantz, Sagit Shushan, Idan Frumin, Yehudah Roth and Noam Sobel, was conducted in collaboration with the Edith Wolfson Medical Center, Holon.
Prof. Noam Sobel's research is supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation 21st Century Science Scholar in Understanding Human Cognition Program; the Minerva Foundation; the European Research Council; and Regina Wachter, NY.
Scientists have found that certain emotional signals are chemically encoded in tears. (Credit: iStockphoto/Arpad Nagy-Bagoly) 医药动态文件类型:DOC/Microsoft Word- 文字版医药动态 长春中医学院图书馆 信息技术部 (第4卷——第4期) 2004.12.30 ·新医新药 ... “冲”进细胞,产生电信号并被传送至大脑中等待破译. 科学家怀疑某些患者耳聋的原因...125.223.205.241/...y2004-4.doc-2010-12-07-医药动态" 乌有之乡电子杂志第七十三期(零八年十月上)利润不相信道德,市场不相信眼泪.只要坚持赚钱第一的私有制,就休想指望“企业家的道... 2006 年轰动全国的“齐二药”毒药事件.医药工业尚且如此,食品加工自然更不在话下....www.wyzxsx.com/zazhi/no.73.htm-2006-11-16-快照-卫生系统部分全国文明单位和全国精神文明建设工作先进单位文件类型:DOC/Microsoft Word- 文字版在先进性教育活动中,我们提出,要把病人呼声为第一信号,病人需要为第一选择,病人满意为... 联合中国科学院上海生命科学研究院、上海第二医科大学健康科学中心、国家人类基因组...www.moh.gov.cn/...11637337.doc-2010-12-23-[标签:content2]
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作者:admin@医学,生命科学 2011-01-08 00:42
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