Royal Society B: women are more scared when they are alone?

January 23, 2020 / bioun / -- a group of several members of University of wurtzburg and a member of Peking University found that if there are other people around, women's response to the voice of disgust will be weakened The results were published in proceedings of the Royal Society B Scientists have explored how to directly measure a person's fear experience Researchers can attach sensors to the skin and measure chemical reactions, a technique called skin conductance reaction (SCR) Scientists have found that when people are stimulated by sex or fear, they will produce chemicals that will enter the skin surface SCR sensors apply a small amount of charge to the skin and use it to measure changes in skin conductivity due to irritating chemicals: the higher the conductivity, the higher the arousal, the greater the fear of experience (image source: www Pixabay Com) to learn more about how the presence of others affects women's fear, the researchers asked 97 female volunteers to sit at their desks, wear SCR sensors, and listen to terrible noises through headphones The researchers tested volunteers by playing a variety of sounds, some of which were designed to elicit a fear response, such as a person's scream The researchers compared volunteers when they were sitting alone or with others nearby In addition, the researchers changed the gender and ethnicity of onlookers They also asked each volunteer to manually assess their level of fear Both the written report and SCR data show that when another person is present, the fear of these women is reduced - even if they don't know each other This result shows that humans are instinctively on high alert when they are alone Source of information: study finds presence of other person decisions near responses in women: Yanyan Qi et al The mer physical presence of other person reductions human automatic responses to average sounds, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2020) Doi: 10.1098/rspb.2019.2241