Decoding The Gurus
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Paper for the next Decoding Academia: Gelstein et al. (2011)
🕑 Added 2023-05-29 11:17:07 +0000 UTCHey folks,
We are going to record a Decoding Academia tomorrow and might make this one a preview open to all as it is a little bit of a primer for a forthcoming Huberman episode.
Specifically, we are going to look at a study from 2011 that Huberman recently promoted that essentially argues that when men smell sad tears from women they are less sexually aroused.
It's a bit of a strange paper but it appeared in Science in 2011 and has some interesting components that make it an interesting case study. Specifically, it includes a bunch of different measures (self-report, physiological measures, and neuroimaging) that appear to triangulate the same result. It also seems to have taken a lot of effort to control for confounds. And yet... I think there are a lot of clear indicators as to why, even before the later failed replication, people should have been skeptical of the results.
If you would like to play along the study is attached or you can find positive coverage of it from the time it was released, here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/tears-as-chemical-signals-smell-of-female-tears-affects-sexual-behaviour-of-men
Comments
Christopher Kavanagh
We arrive at similar conclusions and it is indeed a large claim for all the reasons you suggest!
Teres Hallman
Does happy tears not have the same negative impact on men's arousal? And wonder how long the smell of a sad tear stay on your skin? Just because I had a sad cry sometime during the day I wouldn't want my man to be less sexually aroused by me. Now I have to read the study...
Daniel
Why would tears need to be scented when they can be seen? The common understanding is we *see* and *hear* people cry, not smell them cry. So to me this hypothesis is nonintuitive and I'd need strong evidence to believe it. Emotional tears are mysterious though. You could in principle convey the same emotions with facial expressions, right. So why do certain emotions manifest as physical tears? My guess would be that evolution has produced facial expressions as temporary social signals and tears as prolonged social signals. (It'd be taxing to hold a facial expression for a long time, but tears require no effort to visibly last a while.)
Me
Oh this is going to be awesome…ty!
