Why Some People Cry a River

Everyone cries. Some of our tears are meant to keep our eyes moist and healthy. Others clean out the eye from dust, pollens and other pollutants. Emotional tears play another role. Although triggered by strong feelings such as anger, pain, fear or disappointment, there are aspects of these tears which have not been fully studied.

A paper entitled, Emotional Tears: What they are and how they work by Debra Lieberman (a professor in the Department of Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Oklahoma), highlights some interesting new findings about crying. A team of researchers studied different types of crying, and they also explored the world of emotional tears. The paper concluded that tears are nonverbal signals that communicate the value a person places on acts, ideas and events, said Lieberman. Tears are honest signals of how a person perceives a state of the world. It may be from the most joyous to the darkest.

Tears accompany great achievements and severe loss. They occur when in love, when grateful, and when angry. The ubiquitous nature of tears might seem to resist a functional explanation. However, Lieberman and her colleagues suggest that tears, much like yelling, shouting and screaming, convey the intense amplitude of a felt state.

“Tears signal internal evaluations to targets as a means to an end, as a bid to adjust the target’s own evaluations and behaviors in ways that would favor the tearer,” the authors wrote. “For example, tearing up may cause your spouse to stop doing something you dislike them doing.”

I was alright for a while, 

I could smile for a while. 

Then I saw you last night, 

you held my hand so tight. 

When you stopped to say, "Hello" 

Oh, you wished me well, 

You, you couldn't tell 

That I'd been crying over you. 

Crying over you.

Then you said, "So long"

Left me standing all alone. 

Alone and crying, crying

Crying, crying. 

It's hard to understand 

that the touch of your hand 

Can start me crying 

          --"Crying" by Roy Orbison

Roy Orbison 

 Who Tends to Cry?

Lieberman and colleagues argue that people tear up more when their aggression or ability to generate benefits is low (low formidability). The researchers contend this occurs when people are of low leverage in a given social situation. To some degree, it may explain why women tend to cry more than men, and children tend to cry more than adults. In our society, most men still hold physical and power advantages over women. The researchers theorize that women in a situation that involves conflict with a man may tend to cry but in the same situation with another woman, they may not.

“The capacity for anger and the physical imposition of costs would not have been foreign to ancestral women, who would have engaged in female-female physical conflicts and also dealt with less formidable children and juveniles,” the authors wrote. “But male-female conflicts posed great threats to women, and so the ability for women to shift from direct aggression to tears would have been adaptive. In contrast, tears and other signals of low formidability would have had more adverse effects on a male’s fitness.”

Tears occur even in individuals who have extreme leverage in a given situation, for instance, when expressing the intensity of the pride they feel at their own accomplishments. As an amplitude signal, tears can be shed by all, according to the researchers.

In the current study, they found that criers tend to cry emotional tears with people who can empathize with their plight and who can comfort them. That may help explain why a child may fall but only start crying when they reach their parents or caretakers. The intensity of the crying signal required to obtain consideration can provide tacit information about which individuals care and how much. In some situations, a person may cry around people who tend to care about them, and if a few tears do not work, then they may sob. The mind, say the researchers, strategically determines how much crying is necessary.

Criers are perceived as less physically formidable. A crier in negative contexts is signaling that they have assessed a situation as imposing undue costs. Whereas women, for whom tears are more frequently used in social negotiations, might understand that tears are associated with perceived costs, men might interpret such signals as general weakness and suggest the person is physically and potentially mentally incapable of handling a situation. This may be translated into perceptions of incompetence.

Pregnant women tend to cry more than nonpregnant women because they are more needy and more vulnerable. Although the paper only briefly touches on tears and various ways people react, Lieberman mentions that sensitivity to another’s tears varies between people. While most people understand tears to mean “I am hurt” or “I need help” or, more generally, “I am experiencing a cost,” clinical groups like psychopaths and narcissists, who lack empathy, do not interpret tears in this way. It is almost like they are immune to the manipulative effects of tears yet have no trouble using tears themselves to get the supply and investment they seek.

The phrase “tears of joy” never made much sense to Yale psychologist Oriana Aragon. So, she and her colleagues conducted a series of studies of such seemingly incongruous expressions. Aragon and her colleagues at Yale ran subjects through specific scenarios and measured their responses to cute babies or happy reunions. They found that individuals who express negative reactions to positive news were able to moderate intense emotions more quickly. They also found people who are most likely to cry at their child’s graduation are most likely to want to pinch a cute baby’s cheeks.

There is some evidence that strong negative feelings may provoke positive expressions. For example, nervous laughter appears when people are confronted with difficult or frightening situations. Smiles have been found by other psychologists to occur during extreme sadness. These new discoveries begin to explain common things that many people do but don’t even understand themselves, said Aragon.

John Schieszer is an award-winning national journalist and radio and podcast broadcaster of The Medical Minute. He can be reached at medicalminutes@gmail.com.