IN HIS 1872 book, “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” Charles Darwin insisted that emotional crying (“tearing”) serves no purpose; that it is a mere byproduct of muscular contractions designed to protect the eye. Researchers from the University of Queensland disagreed.
In an experiment, Leah Sharman, Genevieve Dangle, Ad Vingerhoets and Eric Vanman reported that criers had better resilience against stressors than the non-criers did. The evidence had been observed in the participants’ respiration rate. While exposed to continuous stressful stimuli, the respiration of criers remained stable while that of the non-criers increased. The heart rate of criers also decelerated right before crying, which returned to baseline after the first crying episode. The results were published in the journal “Emotions.”
The participants in this experiment were females, which made use of the assumption that females tend to be more emotional or emotionally attuned than males. Of course, there were females in the study that were non-criers. Thus, it can be fairly assumed that some males, too, are criers. However, that is beside the point, which is mainly about the study’s having taken care of a potential confounding factor.
On the side, these findings highlight the Darwinian error of inference that casts doubt on his ability to infer the outcome with his other studies. If he made a mistake on his scientific inference on crying, he could have made a similar mistake in his theory of evolution.
Going back, though, people in general (studies pegged it at more than 70 percent of the studied population) report that crying helps in improving their mood or emotional state. Some attribute it to the experience of catharsis. Are these data enough to infer that the non-criers have difficulty in sustaining persistent emotional stress or negative emotions? Dear readers, check with your friends and see if the numbers add up.
Some studies, however, found that the memory of the positive effects of crying are usually short, reduced to 51 percent, if people are asked of their last crying episode. This change of forgetting through time, in fact, may even indicate that a large part of the positive effects of crying, is an experience of living for today; of living one day at a time.
Alexander Lowen may have made better sense when he wrote in “The Voice of the Body (2005),” “One can comfort a person who is crying which enables him to relax and makes further crying unnecessary.”
Did you hear that, Charles?