研究：人的鼻子能嗅出性别

搜索关注在线英语听力室公众号：tingroom，领取免费英语资料大礼包。

　　Wen Zhou of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and her colleagues found that two compounds in human bodily fluids, androstadienone in males and estratetraenol in females, effectively signal masculinity and femininity, respectively, in manners contingent⁴ upon the recipients⁵' gender and sexual orientation⁶.

　　"Our findings provide behavior support for human chemosensory communication of gender, and argue for the existence of human sex pheromones," Zhou wrote in an email interview with Xinhua.

　　Earlier studies showed that androstadienone, found in male semen and armpits, can promote positive mood in females as opposed to males. Estratetraenol, first identified in female urine, has similar effects on males. But it wasn't clear whether those chemicals were truly acting⁷ as sexual cues.

　　Human nose can sniff out gender: <a href=http://www.hxen.com target=_blank class=infotextkey>study</a>

　　In the new study, Zhou and her colleagues recruited participants of different gender and sexual orientation and examined their gender judgments⁸ of computer dots that represent a person walking, known as point-light walkers.

　　Each participant repetitively viewed seven point-light walkers that ranged from slightly more like a male to slightly more like a female, and pressed one of two buttons to indicate whether each was a male walker or a female walker.

　　In the mean time they were exposed to one of three olfactory⁹ stimuli¹⁰: androstadienone, estratetraenol, or a control solution, all of which smelled like cloves¹¹ and were perceptually indiscriminable.

　　The results revealed that smelling androstadienone systematically¹² biased¹³ heterosexual females, but not males, toward perceiving walkers as more masculine. By contrast, smelling estratetraenol systematically biased heterosexual males, but not females, toward perceiving walkers as more feminine, Zhou said.

　　Interestingly, homosexual males exhibited a response pattern akin¹⁴ to that of heterosexual females, whereas bisexual or homosexual females fell in between heterosexual males and females, she said.

　　While the visual gender cues were extremely ambiguous, smelling androstadienone versus¹⁵ estratetraenol produced about an eight percent change in gender perception, a statistically¹⁶ very significant effect, Zhou noted¹⁷.

　　"The results provide the first direct evidence that the two human steroids communicate opposite gender information that is differentially effective to the two sex groups based on their sexual orientation," the researchers wrote in their paper. " Moreover, they demonstrate that human visual gender perception draws on subconscious¹⁸ chemosensory biological cues, an effect that has been hitherto unsuspected."

　　The findings were published in the U.S. journal Current Biology.（本文由在线英语听力室整理编辑）

分享到：