Evidence map›Paper›PMID 27196115›Full record

ArticleCognition & emotion2017

Revisiting the revisit: added evidence for a social chemosignal in human emotional tears.

Noam Sobel

Abstract readComment
In one paragraph

Article in Cognition & emotion, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
4citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

4 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Emotional expression in human odour.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022
    Review
  2. Review
  3. Interdisciplinary challenges for elucidating human olfactory attractiveness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020
    Review
  4. Reproducible research into human chemical communication by cues and pheromones: learning from psychology's renaissance.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020
    Review
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

1 author.

Noam Sobela Department of Neurobiology , Weizmann Institute of Science , Rehovot , Israel.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

In a study by Gelstein et al., we found that human emotional tears act as a social chemosignal. In the first of three different experiments in that study we observed that sniffing women's emotional tears reduced the sexual attractiveness attributed by men to pictures of women's faces. In a study partly titled "Chemosignaling effects of human tears revisited", Gračanin et al. claim failed replication of this effect in a series of experiments, one they described as "exactly the same procedure" as Gelstein. Given that Gračanin et al. refused our extended offer to jointly replicate the experiment at our expense, we can merely comment on their effort. We find that Gračanin, who are not a chemosignaling laboratory, used methodology that falls short of standards typically applied in chemosignaling research. Thus, their experiments were profoundly different from Gelstein. Finally, we found that in reanalysing their raw data we could in fact replicate the effect from Gelstein. Thus, we conclude that the failed replication in Gračanin is neither a replication nor failed.

Indexed as

EmotionsTearsFemaleHumansMaleSexual Behavioremotional tearslacrimal secretionsSocial chemosignals

Identifiers

PMID27196115
PMCPMC5215200

What OpenQuestion holds

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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.