All humans cry.
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.
In a paper called "Emotional tears: What they are and how they work" by Debra Lieberman, professor in the Department of Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and co-authors Daniel Sznycer of the Department of Psychology at Oklahoma State University and Asmir Gračanin of the Department of Psychology at the University of Rijeka in Rijeka, Croatia, an unexplored territory in the world of emotional tears is examined. The paper will be published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior this year.
The paper concluded that tears are nonverbal signals that communicate the value a person places on acts, ideas, and events, said Lieberman. Tears are—more or less—honest signals of how a person perceives a state of the world—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 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."
But who tends to cry?
Lieberman and colleagues argue that people tear up more when their aggressive formidability or ability to generate benefits is low; that is, when people are of low leverage in a given social situation.
To some degree that explains why women tend to cry more than men and children tend to cry more than adults, she said. In our society, most men still hold a superior status—both physically and in terms of power, she said. Thus, women in a situation that involves conflict with a man 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."
Of course, tears might also 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.
Other findings in the paper include:
- Criers tend to cry emotional tears near persons who can empathize with their plight and comfort them. That explains 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 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 psychopathologies, 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.
