There appears to be a typology of adult crying, too--say, the lonely, subdued weeping where your shoulders go up and down; the occasions where your eyes silently brim over with giant teardrops that race down your cheeks; histrionic, paroxysmal sobs that aren’t altogether unlike the respiratory distress patterns of infants’ cries. Tears generated by physical pain seem different altogether. As far as I know, evolutionary psychologists haven’t looked at these adult crying types in any formal theoretical way, although Nelson does describe a few possible functional differences in her book.
Rottenberg and his coauthors also point out that nearly all of the research on crying to date has centered on negative events. But sadness isn’t the only thing that provokes tears. One of the things I remember vividly about my mother’s face was how her eyes would always fill up with tears whenever she felt genuinely loved. (Needless to say, this sort of thing would always make me want to hug her.) Such “tears of joy”--the ones that flow liberally at events such as weddings and births--betray deep, genuine emotions. Since our ancestors were vulnerable to deception, I suspect that crying probably evolved as a sort of hard-to-fake communicative signal. Comparative psychologists have long suspected that, compared to other social species, human beings are uniquely skilled at manipulation. The fact that we are the only ones who actually shed tears from emotions may shed some important light on our Machiavellian past. Tears would have been a reliable indication that the other party actually felt as sincerely as they said they did.
So as the authors wisely sum up in their review, the question of whether crying is beneficial must be asked in a new way: “Under what conditions and for whom is crying likely to be beneficial?” Now go on, say something to make me cry, I challenge you. Maybe it’ll be good for me, maybe it won’t. But go easy on me--I’m very sensitive. And for God’s sake, leave my dogs out of it.
In this column presented by Scientific American Mind magazine, research psychologist Jesse Bering of Queen's University Belfast ponders some of the more obscure aspects of everyday human behavior. Ever wonder why yawning is contagious, why we point with our index fingers instead of our thumbs or whether being breastfed as an infant influences your sexual preferences as an adult? Get a closer look at the latest data as “Bering in Mind” tackles these and other quirky questions about human nature. Sign up for the RSS feed or friend Dr. Bering on Facebook and never miss an installment again.
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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.