In a series of experiments, men were exposed to either women’s emotional tears or saline, without knowing what they were sniffing or being able to distinguish between the two.įollowing that, they played a two-player game designed to generate hostile behaviour in one player towards the other, who was portrayed as cheating. In the study, researchers, led by PhD student Shani Agron from the institute's Brain Science Lab, set out to determine whether tears have the same aggression-blocking effect in people as they do in rodents. In the study, published in the journal PLOS Biology.