Jesse Bering
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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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I can’t remember the last time I had a good, long cry. Well, that’s not entirely true. I was bawling my eyes out just the other night at the inevitable climax to the movie Marley & Me. But with the possible exception of my eggshell-fragile Achilles’ heel for old and dying dogs, I’ve never been much of a weeper. I’ve always wanted to be, though. At times I’ve even felt a little guilty when tears seemed appropriate but I couldn’t muster any up. Even onions let me down when I once tried to use them to jumpstart a liquid catharsis.
But perhaps crying isn’t all it’s cracked up to be anyway. University of South Florida psychologist Jonathan Rottenberg and his colleagues Lauren Bylsma and Ad J.J.M. Vingerhoets have argued that, contrary to popular belief, there’s actually a surprising absence of empirical data to support the view that crying is beneficial. In fact, there’s even some evidence that--for some people at least--crying could do more harm than good. In a 2008 issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, the authors review all the available evidence to date on crying-based research. They begin by questioning the rather dubious claims made by psychodynamic-minded theorists over the years. These are typically of the “it’s good to get it out of your system” variety, with “it” being those dark, repressive thoughts that clog up your brain or ravage your healthy psychological functioning. In her book Seeing Through Tears: Crying and Attachment (Routledge, 2005), Judith Kay Nelson reports that without any science on the subject to back up their prescriptions for shedding liberal amounts of tears, over two-thirds of mental health practitioners actively promote crying as a therapy tool.
This general sentiment about the salubrious qualities of sobbing are echoed in our common-sense views too. In survey reports where researchers asked people whether having a good cry made them feel better, respondents overwhelmingly say it has. But the curious thing, Rottenberg and coauthors point out, is that in laboratory-based psychology experiments where crying is elicited by a sad stimulus (such as a clip from Marley & Me, which will do nicely if you have a sliver of a heart), participants who cry actually report feeling worse than those who watch the same scene without crying.
There are obvious reasons why the retrospective self-reports of crying episodes fail to line up neatly with findings from controlled experiments on crying. For one, crying in response to a tearjerker in a sterile laboratory environment after some stranger attaches physiological equipment to you and then takes notes in the other room isn’t exactly the same as crying into a pillow in your own bedroom. Negative social emotions such as embarrassment might cancel out any possible positive feelings.
It’s a classic dilemma in emotion research--how does one produce genuine, unadulterated affect in a rigorously controlled laboratory setting so that the findings are “ecologically valid” (that is to say, true to life)? Experimental psychologists can’t very well go around making their participants cry by being mean to them or telling them that their dog just died. Well not ethically, anyway. So any tears conjured up in the lab are probably going to be somewhat contrived, sort of like a doctor striking your knee with a rubber mallet rather than you giving a genuine kick. There’s also the issue of individual differences. What’s painfully sad for one person isn’t necessarily so for another; thus the comparative benefits of crying versus not crying aren’t necessarily equivalent across the participant sample.
Wary of the limitations of experimental design in researching crying behavior, the authors describe a recent study in which they analyzed over 3000 detailed reports of natural sobs. Consistent with the earlier survey findings, participants overall reported positive mood changes after crying. When they looked at the data more closely, however, the authors discovered that a third of the respondents reported no mood changes at all, and a tenth of them reported feeling even worse after crying. “Importantly,” Rottenberg and his colleagues write, “variation in social-environmental factors tracked the mood benefits of crying.” Specifically:
Criers who received social support during their crying episode were more likely to report mood benefits than were criers who did not report receiving social support. Likewise, mood benefits were more likely when the precipitating events of a crying episode had been resolved than they were when events were unresolved. Finally, criers who reported experiencing negative social emotions like shame and embarrassment were less likely to report mood benefits.
To me, the social aspects of crying--including how such behavior often serves a solicitous role in prompting responses by onlookers--are incredibly fascinating. And the social dynamic starts early. According to evolutionary psychologist Nick Thompson from Clark University, the acoustic characteristics of distress cries in infants are specially designed to goad caregivers into responding quickly. The proposed adaptation involves a rapid, gasping inhalation between bursts of loud crying. Thompson belives that this ‘pitch-to-cry' ratio deceives parents into thinking that the baby might be suffering from some sort of respiratory distress, which in turn triggers a prompt caregiving response. The baby of course, certainly isn’t manipulating the parent consciously; nor is the parent always fooled. But the idea is that natural selection favored those babies whose cries mimicked choking sounds because adults were generally more vigilant to those babies’ needs. As a consequence, these babies (who were our ancestors) would have been less likely to find themselves left alone or with strangers for long periods of time--and therefore less likely to befall genuine harm.
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14 Comments
Add CommentHow about this? http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8175000/8175790.stm
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReally interesting article, BTW - beautifully written.
As the article suggests, it's not the crying that helps or not, it's the context of the tears.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen might tears *not* be useful?:
- when the self-talk is all negative and talks us into a worse place than we started
- when we don't get support/understanding (or at least tolerance) from others for our distress
- when the tears are a chance to rehearse the situation that produced them (i.e., practicing being in a place that feels that bad - such as trauma -- not something you want to be practicing!)
When might tears *be useful*?:
- when they allow us to stop allocating self-control resources to holding them back (literally freeing energy for other things)
- when they allow us to grieve or otherwise "pass through" a painful place to a place of acceptance or other positive shifts
- when they connect us to those around us or memories of support that let us feel more positive
- when they occur not for their own sake but as an acknowledgment of emotion (not using self-control resources pretending they aren't there) as a signal for what needs changing ( and then creating action that supports those needs)
http://www.crisisbook.org/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis book is a definite tearjerker. I can't even make it through the introduction without tearing up :(
I am reluctant to cry because usually, I later (very soon) experience a headache hangover. I have wondered how uncommon this is?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article makes the interesting but patently false assumption that tears cannot be faked.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Experimental psychologists cant very well go around making their participants cry by being mean to them or telling them that their dog just died"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut, curiously enough, they can be mean to, or even cause the death of, the dog, if such processes would be interesting experimentally...............odd world, isn't it?
Obviously, we cry when we're sad, but have you ever laughed until you cried? Been so angry that you cried? Been so frightened that you cried? Felt so much joy that you cried? Chances are good that you were brought into this world crying.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt doesn't take a study to see the most basic response to any emotion is crying. A more interesting study would be to see how other responses, such as laughing, are related to crying.
I can't imagine crying over a sad movie or cut onions to be as cathartic as actually crying about whatever grief is making you sad.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI find the article remarkably short on this insight.
The article doesn't make the assumption that tears "can't be faked." The author says simply that they're "hard to fake." And that's certainly true, isn't it? Try to conjure up some actual, believable tears right now!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI remember reading somewhere that researchers had analysed tears and found high levels of hormones associated with emotional feelings. They concluded that crying might be a mechanism to remove such hormones from the system thereby helping the crier to return to a calmer state. If this is true, it would seem to concur with above comments about crying for all kinds of emotions (happiness, sadness, laughter, fear etc.) and with feeling better after a good cry.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSniffing, sobbing, wiling and ranting are socially acceptable expressions in some cultures. Other cultures may expect singing and dancing to send a soul to paradise. I love it when psychologists take themselves seriously.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOver my 40 year career as a psychotherapist, I have observed that people who are depressed and have no focus for their pain do not benefit from crying like someone who is sad and grieving about something specific.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think the presumed relief from tears could be related to the broader, and mistaken notion of the benefits of catharsis, going back to Aristotle's idea that the emotions elicited by theater represented catharsis, and were therapeutic. Research during the late 1990's demonstrated that "letting it all out"not only did not reduce aggression, but actually intensified it--although it give some temporary relief to the aggressor. Presumably the relief gained from tears is also temporary.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI nearly always cry when talking about the victims of nuclear weapons in Japan, after having known several of the survivors.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI cried and shook when my brother-in-law died, but my wife didn't.