The Last Word On Nothing

Yesterday I woke up, after sleeping in, to the sound of my husband and 7-year-old son yelling at the screen during the Women’s World Cup final. I came downstairs in time to watch the end, and soon enough I was crying like anything, even though I am not a Sports Person. There was just so much emotion on the field that it reached out and wrung my mirror neurons until tears came out of my eyes.

The older I get, the more emotionally sensitive I seem to be. I tear up at movies, at books, at commercials, at tweets. My switches are flipped so easily, just a few bars of “sad” music sends me over the edge.

There is so much horribleness out there in the world—so much real horribleness, from concentration camps at the border to a sexual predator in the White House to climate change—that it sometimes baffles me that I can listen to the news without curling up into a ball and sobbing. And yet some celebrating soccer players or an obituary in the paper will throw open the flood gates. Things that hit me the hardest include people behaving decently to one another and people who faced obstacles achieving their goals. Not sad stuff, but the opposite. My mother has the same tendency, despite being pretty tough and very much Norwegian-American about displays of emotion. When she is moved to tears despite her attempts to stay dry-eyed, she often says “its all just so goddam poignant!” And then we laugh. What is wrong with us?

Crying isn’t a rational response to the suffering the the world. It is not a meter by which we measure our actual horror at the things happening around us. It is something much less controllable, something that comes out of older, weirder parts of our brains. Humans cry not just when they are sad but when they are moved, which is a whole other ball of wax.

What is it to be moved? A paper from earlier this year by Janis Zickfeld at the University of Oslo and his colleagues tried to define it. They quote another researcher—E.S.Tan at the University of Amsterdam—who compares being moved to “being conquered.” This seems just right to me. When I am moved I am suddenly overwhelmed and overcome with the emotional implications of what I am considering. It is a full body sensation, including weeping and an ache or expansion or glow in my chest. The sense of being conquered also explains why I can feel annoyed at being moved against my will, especially when I have been moved by a truck commercial or a crassly tear-jerking tv show. (In the spirit of full transparency, I should admit that I started to feel a telltale tickling in my lacrimal glands just by reading about some of the stimuli used to elicit the sensation of being moved in psychological studies.)

A review from Lauren Bylsma at the University of Pittsburgh and her colleagues last year says that human emotional crying evolved from animal distress calls, which the young of many species make when they are separated from their parents. For most other species, distress calls disappear in adulthood. For us, the crying goes on into adulthood, but becomes increasingly linked to strong emotions of all colors. Women cry a lot more than men. Bylsma’s review says adult women cry on average 4–5 times a month, men just 0-1 times a month. I have seen my husband cry twice, maybe three times since we got together in 2003. I cry three times a week, easy. Probably more.

Bylsma writes that “the hypothesis regarding the function of this behavior can be best summarized as tearful crying facilitates social connections.” This makes sense. Crying is a clear and difficult-to-feign signal that a person is feeling strong emotion and could probably use some support or sympathy.

Bylsma et. al. report that research on why and how we cry is still underdeveloped, writing that it “has surprisingly received relatively little attention from scientists.” I, for one, am not that surprised, given the gendered distribution of the behavior. If men cried all the time, we would probably know much more about it. Darwin, a noted dude, apparently regarded crying as “a purposeless by-product of evolution,” according to a May 2019 study on gendered responses to crying by Marie Stadel of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and her colleagues.

The Stadel et. al. study is fascinating. Her team showed images of crying women and men to male and female participants—mostly young psych students. Some of the images had the actual tears digitally removed. Participants were then asked to agree or disagree with statements like “I am inclined to ask this person whether I can be of any help.”

They found that the presence of visible tears substantially increased the number of people willing to help, replicating a previous study with a similar setup. Tears really do seem to be a social signal that the person needs comfort or assistance–or just someone to be with them in their emotion. They also found that men were less willing to help crying men than crying women. Women didn’t show this pattern—they wanted to help all tearful people. If men receive less social support than women for crying, it may help explain why they cry less, especially if, thanks to “norms of hegemonic masculinity” crying could lead to “negative appraisals regarding the subject’s competence.” Or as Ron Swanson summed it up on Parks and Recreation: “Crying: acceptable at funerals, and the Grand Canyon.”

Poor men. When they are feeling sad and helpless, what do they do, if they cannot cry because of our cultural norms? Do their tears flow internally, running down their throats and into their stomachs, salty signals turned to poison?

And what do they do when they feel moved? Are they ever moved? Of course they are. Do they blink away the tears? Do they stop them from coming out by squeezing some muscle only they possess?

I used to be ashamed of my promiscuous tears, especially when elicited by corny or manipulative stimulus. But I am learning to go easier on myself on this and other matters. I simply can’t help it. I am extremely easily moved. The fact that I wept over a soccer game I didn’t even watch but do not sob every day over the injustices of the world makes its own kind of sense. My easy tears are like an emotional sneeze, triggered by nearby stimulus, often positive. The really horrible things don’t tickle that brain pathway. They don’t make me cry. They make me angry.