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SYDNEY, March 8 (Xinhua) -- During the 1990s a United States company Erox, patented two specific compounds that reported to be sex-specific human pheromones, however researchers in Australia have announced Wednesday that it may not be the case.
"Our study is suggesting that these two particular steroid compounds are not pheromones," The University of Western Australia's Centre for Evolutionary Biology, Professor Leigh Simmons told Xinhua.
To conduct the study, researchers followed up on an experiment that came out of China's Academy of Sciences, where they asked subjects to assign gender to ambiguous videos of people walking, while being administered by the Erox compound.
"So we replicated this kind of experiment using morphed images of faces that appeared gender neutral, we then administered our subjects with the Erox compound and asked them what sex the faces were," Simmons said.
So if the compound acted like pheromones, the male subjects of the study should see the face as female and for the female subjects, the faces should appear male.
"Our study found that the subjects could not identify gender above chance," he said.
In a second experiment the researchers collected a series of male and female faces and asked subjects to rate their attractiveness before and after being exposed to pheromones.
If the substance were a pheromone, researchers say they would expect the participants to find the faces of the opposite sex more attractive after being in contact with it.
"The compound had no effect on people's ratings of attractiveness," he said.
Although a lot is known about animal pheromones, scientists still have a lot to understand about how the process works in humans.
