Hexadecanal research

In the battle of the sexes, there are a lot of antidotal evidence in humor or personal lives that boys and girls are different. Then I came across this curious paper:

Source:
bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.29.318287; this version posted September 30, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.

Terrestrial mammals use pheromones to effectively trigger or block conspecific aggression. Here we tested whether hexadecanal (HEX), a human body-volatile implicated as a mammalian-wide social odor, impacts human aggression. Using validated behavioral paradigms, we observed a remarkable dissociation: sniffing HEX blocked aggression in men, but triggered aggression in women. Next, using functional brain imaging, we uncovered a pattern of brain activity mirroring behaviour: In both men and women, HEX increased activity in the left angular gyrus, an area implicated in perception of social cues. Hex then modulated functional connectivity between the angular gyrus and a brain network implicated in social appraisal (temporal pole) and aggressive execution (amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex) in a sex-dependent manner consistent with behaviour: increasing connectivity in men, but decreasing connectivity in women. These findings implicate HEX as a human pheromone, whose sex-specific brain processing is at the mechanistic heart of human aggressive behavior.​

So that is what is going on. We, the males, need a deodorant and hygiene products that suppress or blocks hexadecanal.

Bob Wilson

ps. Fixed the autocorrect error.

 

I’m not that anal.

Bob Wilson