An international team of scientists has succeeded in showing that the pheromones of human beings provide us with information about the gender of people .
The human body produces certain chemical signals (androstadienone in men, found in semen and armpits; and estratetraenol in women, found in urine) that inform people who are attracted to that particular gender. smell and that our nose is capable of unconsciously capturing , according to the researchers in the study published in the journal Current Biology .
“The novelty of this study is that human pheromones report on the masculinity or femininity of the person who segregates them depending on the gender and sexual orientation of the person who detects them,” says Wen Zhou, scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and leader of the study.
To reach this conclusion, the researchers conducted an experiment with four groups of healthy, non-smoking participants consisting of 24 heterosexual men, 24 heterosexual women, 24 homosexual men, and 24 homosexual or bisexual women . The test consisted of identifying on a screen whether the movement of the digital figures that appeared belonged to men or women. Participants performed this task while being exposed each day to a different but similar-smelling solution (cloves) based on androstadienone, estratetraenol, or a control solution.
The results showed that the androstadienone-based solution attracted heterosexual women, but not men, towards a more masculine perception of figures. In the same way, when smelling stratetraenol, heterosexual men perceived the figures as more feminine, which was not the case with women ; In addition, the researchers observed that homosexual men responded to pheromones in a similar way to heterosexual women.
“The results provide the first direct evidence that both pheromones communicate information about gender. And furthermore, they show that the visual perception of gender is based on subconscious chemosensory biological signals, an effect that until now was unknown ”, concludes Zhou.
