Children automatically cry when they get hurt physically. As we grow older, most of the reasons we cry are emotionally rooted. According to Randolph Cornelius, crying is a vital process of letting of of our physiological tensions. He systematically analyzed popular articles on the subject from 1850 to 1985 of which, 94 per cent recommended letting the tears flow. If physiological tensions is not released, it would find its own outlet of releasing, thus affecting the body, causing illness.
During therapy sessions, crying is considered to be constructive from the perspective of pyschotherapists and counsellors. This does not include depression and neurological conditions as well as manipulative crying. A person may cry to a total stranger like the pyschotherapist for the first session and feel relief within minutes. Most of these clients expresses their emotions and may report in the next appointment that she feels much better after the emotional episode. While lay people tend to avoid crying, psychologists steer sessions to crying.
On the other hand, laboratory studies of crying conducted by Cornelius showed little evidence of physiological and mood benefits after crying. Almost all types of people from different walks of life will not contend that crying is beneficial. Why then the difference between the perceptions of people who went through crying in the laboratory and outside the laboratory?
Crying is nature’s way of decreasing the heaviness of problems and and stressful situations that we encounter in our lives.
Volunteers who cry in a laboratory setting often do not describe their experiences as being psychotherapeutic or making them feel better. Such emotional display in a laboratory setting often results in the study participants feeling worse. This may be caused by the stressful conditions of the study itself, such as being videotaped or watched by research assistants. This may produce negative emotions, such as embarrassment, which neutralize the positive benefits usually associated with crying. Apparently, this simply states that there is still difference between experimental stimuli and real life situations. There is the factor of build up of personal stresses prior to emotional outbursts and this is what cannot be captured in a laboratory setting.
Though medically, crying has been known to be a sign of physical pain or stress, new research results suggested that they bring people closer together. Such are the analytic findings of Dr. Oren Hasson of Tel Avic University from the Department of Zoology. According to Hasson, “Crying is a highly evolved behavior. Tears give clues and reliable information about submission, needs and social attachments between one another. My research is trying to answer what the evolutionary reasons are for having emotional tears.”
“My analysis suggests that by blurring vision, tears lower defences and reliably function as signals of submission, a cry for help, and even in a mutual display of attachment and as a group display of cohesion.” Findings on the different kinds of tears, its reasons and sincerity, were published in Evolutionary Psychology.
Philosophically speaking, crying is nature’s way of decreasing the heaviness of problems and and stressful situations that we encounter in our lives. By letting the tears flow, we are letting the stress overflow and in so doing, diminishes the load of life’s burdens.
Photo by Brendon Baunach
