Crying Without Tears: The Psychology of Crying

Why do Humans cry? The Psychology of Crying

Humans cry for many reasons, but crying for emotional reasons and crying in response to aesthetic experiences are unique to us.

The former is most associated with loss and bereavement, and the art forms that are most associated with tears are music, literature, and poetry. There are very few people who cry looking at paintings, sculptures or lovely buildings.

But we also have tears of joy; the associated feelings of which last a shorter time than crying in the other circumstances.

If it is the case that only humans cry emotionally, then there must have been a time in human evolution when tears took on an additional meaning to their hitherto biological functions, namely as a signal of distress, and a cipher for suffering.

In fact, several studies have shown that individuals are more willing to offer emotional support and help a person in tears. Preliminary evidence suggests that this greater willingness to provide support is mediated via perceived warmth and helplessness. Moreover, tearful individuals are regarded as more reliable and honest.

But what if you couldn’t cry? Crying without Tears…

Or what if you couldn’t recognize your own face when you were sad and wanted your tears to flow?

There are people who do not have the ability to cry and that can have a huge effect on their mental well-being.

Crying without tears is called Sjogren’s syndrome; those who do not have the ability to shed tears also might experience difficulty in expressing their emotions. This leaves them to rely on their facial expressions and words to let people know how they feel.

EurekAlert reported that a Dutch study, which assessed 300 people showed that patients with Sjogren’s syndrome were labeled clinically “alexithymic”.   This means that they have difficulty identifying and describing emotions.  These patients were compared to the control group where only 12% of the healthy controls had difficulty identifying emotions.

A very interesting fact that the study revealed was that higher levels of alexithymia were moderately correlated with worse mental well-being in both groups.

Empathetic Crying

There is no scientific basis that animals can weep as humans do.

Years of observations still do not show if chimpanzees can cry in response to emotions.

Many animals shed tears in response to pain or use tears as a protective device – to keep their eyes moist and free of bacteria, but it is not clear if they can illicit tears due to empathy. 

Crying due to empathy seems to be unique the human condition. 

The New York Times reveals that after a few month of birth tearful crying, for humans, becomes a form of communication and ‘begins to serve interpersonal purposes:  the search for comfort and pacification. 

As we get older, crying becomes a tool of our social repertory: grief and joy, shame and pride, fear and manipulation.

More recently, we’ve learned from neuroscience that certain brain circuits are activated, rapidly and unconsciously, when we see another in emotional distress.

In short, our brain evolved circuits to allow us to experience empathy and compassion, which in turn made civilization possible. There are many interesting facts and insights into tearful crying, which this article points out one it that tears seem to be the only body fluids that do not evoke feelings of disgust. 

There’s no real surprise that women not only cry more frequently men but they cry more intensely too. Men tend not to try and explain their tears but apologize for them instead.  Men are more likely than women to cry when their core identities- as providers and protector, fathers and fighters are questioned.

Fake Crying

Clearly, people can cry without tears and be sad or remorseful without crying. The question is whether we can tell whether people are faking sadness and crying.

Research has demonstrated people can somewhat differentiate between fake and genuine emotion, including crying and tears. People implicitly do so when assessing trustworthiness of others; judgments are trustworthiness are generally associated with judgments of genuineness of other’s emotional displays whereas judgments of untrustworthiness are generally associated with judgments of less genuine emotionality.

But there’s lots of individual differences in how well people can make such judgments; and even when people make such judgments, they may not know exactly how they do so.

Here’s some tips: research has indicated that people who fake remorse, sadness, or crying generally express a greater range of emotions than those who genuinely experience remorse, sadness, or crying. Those who are genuine generally express only that emotion and a neutral state, whereas fakers generally express other emotions as well, even happiness.

Also, fakers tend to have speech hesitations – uh, I don’t know…, etc.  Thus, fakers generally display a volatile mix of deliberate, falsified expressions combined with genuine, emotional leakage.

One thing that we have found in training thousands to read microexpressions is that, by learning to read what these genuine microexpressions look like, many people learn to recognize with non-genuine emotional expressions also look like.

This makes sense; if you want to know what a fake looks like, you need to know what the genuine object looks like. Thus, use our MIX to learn how to read genuine, and hopefully fake, emotional expressions.