BRITISH tennis player Andy Murray knows what itâs like to be unpopular. Early in his career, his aloofness and volatility on the court left many with the impression that he was petulant, spoiled, even unpatriotic. Then came Wimbledon 2012, and a gruelling final against six-time champion Roger Federer. After Murray lost, he took the microphone to thank his fans. He quavered, tried to speak and stopped to wipe away tears. In that moment, Murray won over the British public. â,â he later acknowledged.
But tears can have the opposite effect. In 1972, they were the undoing of US Democratic presidential hopeful Edmund Muskie. He was his partyâs front runner at first, but his campaign fell apart after he was accused of crying while addressing the press to defend his wifeâs reputation. He claimed the moisture on his face was melting snowflakes â the event took place outdoors in a blizzard â but to no avail. His image as the candidate of calm and reason was shattered.
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That crying can change peopleâs fates is beyond doubt; . But why tears can have such a far-reaching effect is not obvious. âIf you compare tearful crying with other emotional expressions, very little is known,â says psychologist Asmir Gracanin at the University of Rijeka, Croatia. What we do know is that emotional crying is downright weird. Many animals produce tears to protect their eyes, but humans alone cry out of feeling. And we cry not only when weâre sad, but also when weâre happy, overwhelmed, enraptured and in pain. Why do we do it? What are the benefits of blubbing? More pointedly, when should you keep a stiff upper lip, and when might it help to turn on the waterworks?
People have long puzzled over crying. Aristotle purportedly viewed tears as an excretion like urine. âThat they are of one nature is plain to the taste,â he is reported to have said. Reflecting this idea, in the 1940s, American psychoanalyst Phyllis Greenacre suggested that female weeping was a symptom of penis envy â a way for a woman to imitate a man urinating. Less provocatively, Darwin concluded that, in addition to lubricating the eye, tears âserve as a relief to sufferingâ, although he didnât explain exactly how.
The idea that crying is cathartic remains popular. But what does that even mean? For Freudians it suggests the release of pent-up emotions â the principle behind folk wisdom encouraging people to âlet it outâ. Another interpretation is that crying rids the body of harmful chemicals, such as stress hormones, produced by emotional distress. , when biochemist William Frey found that tears of emotion were richer in protein than non-emotional tears. But Ad Vingerhoets at Tilburg University in the Netherlands is dubious, having twice tried and failed to replicate this finding.
Like other bodily fluids, tears tend to reflect the composition of the blood, he notes, but that doesnât mean their function is to purge the blood of certain substances. âWe would never say that after having drooled, we feel better,â he says. Besides, the average cry only produces around a millilitre of tears.
The myth of catharsis
So why do many people say that crying makes them feel better? One possibility, says Gracanin, is that itâs just that misery doesnât last for ever. Our mood improves by the time weâve finished crying, even if itâs just returning to normal from rock bottom. that crying relaxes the body by activating the parasympathetic nervous system, or by pumping up levels of oxytocin, the âcuddle hormoneâ. Gracanin is investigating these possibilities, but says that even if the effects are genuine, the reason we feel better may be something other than tears. âWe still donât know,â he says.
Could crying have another purpose? These days, most researchers believe its function is not physiological, but social. âIf you cry, you send a signal that you need help,â says Gracanin.
âCrying in men isnât just acceptable, sometimes it can be downright desirableâ
At first glance, liquid dripping from the eyesis a strange signal of helplessness, but neuroscientist Robert Provine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, thinks he knows how it evolved. Many animals clean their eyes and reduce irritation by secreting tears from the lacrimal glands, above the outer corner of each eye (see diagram, below). Provine believes that as humans evolved, tears acquired a second role. âIf someone has injured their eye or is suffering from disease, others might comfort or assist them,â he says. âAnd after that, the presence of tears emerged as a cue for caregiving.â In other words, once crying started to elicit help from others, it became worth our while to shed tears over any hurt, physical or mental.
Still, why did the eyes become the channel for signalling distress, and not sweaty palms or pale lips? The eyes are perhaps the best clue we have to what others are thinking, Gracanin points out, so we are predisposed to look at them. You can also generally count on eyes to be visible. âThey are a quite nice place to put a signal, as opposed to some other body part,â he says.
And what a signal: has found that the presence of tears on sad faces that volunteers saw for just 50 milliseconds boosted feelings of sympathy, supportiveness and friendship towards the individual pictured. Tears also help us overcome feelings of revulsion. Dennis Kuester at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, showed people pictures of injured faces, with and without tears, and measured the action of the levator labii, a facial muscle closely associated with expressions of disgust. Faces with tears provoked less revulsion than ones without them. âTears really show that someone is in need of support, of empathy, of help, and that you should approach that person, even if there are some signs of injury,â says Kuester.
One reason crying affects us so strongly is that, as many actors know, itâs hard to fake. âIt is considered an âhonestâ signal, which makes it really powerful,â says Vingerhoets. Provine agrees. âThe ability to shed and respond to tears of emotion is important in the evolution of empathy,â he says. Tears, it could be argued, bring out the best in us.
But itâs also clear that our reactions to crying depend on a lot of factors, not least the sex of the person crying â although For example, psychologists Heather MacArthur and Stephanie Shields of Pennsylvania State University presented subjects with scenarios in which both men and women in the roles of nurse and firefighter broke down in tears while trying to help an injured person. The participants were then asked to rate the masculinity of the person who cried and the acceptability of crying. The firefighters were generally considered more masculine, whatever their sex.
Given the popular association between femininity and emotional display, you might think that crying by those in the more stereotypically feminine role of nurse would be more acceptable. In fact, the researchers found the opposite. â,â says MacArthur. âIt didnât matter whether that firefighter was female or male.â
Doing a stereotypically masculine job may give you more of a licence to cry, whatever your sex, but . This may have an unexpected explanation rooted in how tears alter our looks. Kuester showed a series of computer-generated neutral faces of ambiguous gender to volunteers, asking them to rate how masculine or feminine these looked with and without tears. His hypothesis was that adding tears to faces would make them look more feminine, given that stereotypes link tears and femaleness.
To his surprise, male respondents thought that tears made faces look more masculine. In another experiment, using faces with a range of ages, Kuester found that men perceived tears as making faces look younger. In light of these findings, he speculates that tears may help protect women from inappropriate male advances and aggression. âWhen a woman is crying, it suggests to the male that, OK, now this is not a sexual object, but someone who needs help,â says Kuester.
Men may not be sending out the same signals when they cry and, in many cultures, they are under pressure to suppress their emotions. But these may not be as strong or pervasive as we tend to think. and found that far from being a place of âmanlyâ restraint, sport provides a safe arena for displays of feeling, including cheering, crying and hugging, among fans and players. In the sporting context, âemotion widely believed to be âunmanlyâ is allowedâ, they write.
âCrying in men isnât just acceptable, sometimes it can be downright desirableâ
Whatâs more, crying in a man isnât just acceptable, . In another study, Shields and colleagues found that participants rated men who showed intense yet controlled emotion in a sad situation as more competent than those who showed no emotion at all. âSuch displays convey that men are human, feeling beings,â the researchers conclude. The finding doesnât surprise Thomas Dixon, director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, and author of Weeping Britannia. This take on manliness has appeared time and again throughout history, he says. âPeople have argued that crying shows that you are not only strong and rational, but also feeling, and that thatâs the ultimate kind of masculinity.â
Although crying is still full of mysteries (see âA very peculiar practiceâ), its benefits are becoming clearer. âShowing your vulnerability is sometimes very positive,â says Vingerhoets. But tears must be used wisely. âHow positively tears are viewed depends on what youâre crying about â it has to be perceived as something important, and not your fault,â says Shields.
How you cry is also crucial: welling up usually makes a better impression than open weeping. Ironically, the powerful are more often admired for their tears than the weak. âThe individual who would be most sympathetically seen would be somebody who has earned the right to cry via status,â says Shields. That might help explain why Murray has gone from being considered spoiled and petulant to a two-time winner of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award. âCrying changes everything,â says Provine.
A very peculiar practice
Look closely at crying, and you will see just how strange it is. For one thing, it encompasses two very different processes: vocal wailing and tearing.
Human babies excel at the former, and for good reason â bawling is a very effective way of getting attention from caregivers. For their first few weeks, babies donât even shed tears, because their tear glands are still developing. But as they grow, crying becomes less vocal and more tearful.
This could be an evolutionary adaptation, suggests Ad Vingerhoets at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Wailing advertises vulnerability to everyone around, including predators, so once a child can move around, it is wiser to use the more covert signal of tears.
Another puzzle is that we cry throughout our lives. Intriguing changes in crying behaviour seem to reflect its changing functions as we age. Around adolescence, we begin to cry less over physical pain and more over emotional pain. Many people also start to exhibit âmoral cryingâ, in reaction to acts of bravery, self-sacrifice and altruism. Why we do this is still a mystery.
Also mysterious is why, as we age, we increasingly shed tears over things that are positive. Robert Provine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has a suggestion. âGiven that emotional tearing is recently evolved, itâs a very crude estimate of emotional expression,â he says. âWe also produce tears when we yawn, when we sneeze, when we laugh, when we cough.â
Another theory is that so-called tears of joy do not actually reflect happiness at all; events such as weddings and holidays are often bittersweet because they remind us of the passage of time and mortality. This may be why children usually do not cry out of happiness: they donât yet make the associations with sacrifice, loss and impermanence.
Then thereâs the question of why some people cry more than others. , Vingerhoets reported that neurotics and people who are highly empathic cry the most. The former use tears manipulatively â as do narcissists, psychopaths and tantrum-throwing toddlers. Sociopaths are thought most likely to cry fake or âcrocodileâ tears.
And, although boys and girls cry frequently until puberty, in Western cultures women cry at least twice as often as men. Men are culturally conditioned to restrain their tears, but there may be more to it than that. Studies in animals suggest the hormone .
This article appeared in print under the headline âA good cryâ
