Human tears as social chemo-signals in taming male aggression

The human brain is endlessly fascinating and complex. It is also highly plastic, shaped by numerous interacting factors, including sociocultural influences. Gender is one such factor, whose influence plays out on biological and cultural levels, inescapably intertwined with each other (Mei et al. 2022). The field of social neuroscience, which is tasked with parsing the neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms of social behavior is rather young, despite the possibility that chemo-signaling plays a complex role in evolution (Graziano 2022). Exposure to predator odors prompts prey animals, particularly rodents, to exhibit escape or defensive behaviors, sparking discussions on whether a single volatile compound or a combination of odors triggers these responses (Apfelbach et al. 2015). The effect of sex/gender on the social brain has clear clinical relevance (Pavlova 2017). Changes in odor perception are seen in many disease syndromes, including neuropsychiatric disorders. Mechanisms that interlink sex differences in the brain to disease biology, to manifest behavioral differences, thus need to be investigated (Eslinger et al. 2021).