The case for crying

The first time I cried at the movies, I was watching “Avengers: Endgame.” I didn’t cry during the movie, and I am not that serious of a Marvel fan. It was only once the credits started rolling, as I stared incredulously at the big screen, that I began to sob. I was sorry for the expectant moviegoers who unknowingly signed up for the movie showing after mine, but the tears streaming down my face proved to be a part of something much larger, more significant than an inadvertent spoiler. In that moment, I became a crier.

I won’t pretend that I was a stoic child. I was the sibling who started fights — taunting my sister until she hit her tipping point, and then playing the victim and cuing the tears. But in my adolescence, crying was a direct emotional response to sadness, frustration and anger. Back then, I was rational and sensible about my tears, and they came when I was experiencing great injustices; they came at moments of true despair, instigated only by conflicts I experienced firsthand. I can no longer claim this to be the case.

I have cried a significant amount in college. But, rarely did my tears indicate that I was sad. Instead, I have wept from laughter, nostalgia, relief and most commonly, for no discernible reason at all. Yet, in spite of my own experiences, I still link crying with sorrow. 

Recent research suggests that there are three types of tears. Basal tears are the tears that keep the eyes clean. They are the everyday moisture that spreads over your eyeballs as you blink. Reflex tears are the ones that make your eyes water in response to an irritant, like the fumes of an onion. These tears act as a protectant, containing antibodies to flush out invading germs. Emotional tears are the only type of tears activated by the limbic system, which is the part of the brain that controls emotional regulation. They differ biochemically from the other kinds of tears in that they are made up of neurotransmitters and hormones. It has long been believed that humans are the only species that can produce emotional tears, although research about the validity of this claim is ongoing.

Certainly, crying is not new for the human species. In fact, the tears streaming down our faces may have served an evolutionary purpose as a signal of distress. Other animals have their versions of a call for help, but they are cues typically reserved for babies to signal to their parents that something is wrong. Young animals grow out of their helplessness, though, and so these distress calls become unnecessary. Humans, however, are not as lucky to age out of bouts of despair and vulnerability. Hence, crying continues with age, at least for most of us. 

Music, Theater & Dance sophomore Lukas Nepomuceno noticed he stopped crying around the ages of 13 to 14.

“I used to cry pretty normally,” Nepomuceno said. “I internally learned that it is better to just not do that … partly (because of) what I would observe from people’s reaction to when I would cry.’”

Nepomuceno’s experience is not outside of the norm for men. Beyond adolescence, women tend to cry at significantly higher rates than men — a difference that is not observed among children of different genders. Biological reasons for the gender disparity in crying patterns have been proposed, such as the inhibitory effect of testosterone on tear production and the role of prolactin, a hormone present in higher levels in females, in reducing the crying threshold. However, a biological basis for sex-based crying differences has yet to be confirmed, and socialization could also play a role. 

Research suggests that tears might be the way that a crier signals to others that they need support by invoking an empathetic response in those around them. In fact, the higher protein content in emotional tears makes them more viscous, allowing them to roll down your face more slowly, perhaps making them more easily observable. Since we cry not only to feel better but to also induce a social response, it follows that a negative social response would discourage crying. In patriarchal societies that value men for their strength and see tears as a sign of weakness, perhaps it should not come as a surprise that a Dutch study found that both male and female participants perceived male crying as less appropriate than female crying. And public perception can drastically influence individual behavior.

Nepomuceno acknowledged that reality. “Sometimes I think, ‘Maybe I should be crying right now’ … Other times I am looking for a catharsis and it doesn’t happen easily for me.” 

Yet the marked decrease in crying frequency from his childhood suggests that his reluctance to cry is a learned behavioral pattern, rather than an innate one.

Maybe tears are just our biological mechanism for attention, but I have a problem with that theory — I would much rather cry alone. LSA sophomore Sania Hasan also cries alone. 

“Sometimes I cry when I’m walking home,” Hasan said. “If the weather’s nice and I can enjoy the walk, then I can really feel my emotions. Sometimes I’ll cry in the shower. Sometimes I cry before I go to bed. I’ll play Phoebe Bridgers, really lean into it.”

Therefore, there must be a personal benefit to crying, one that is achieved without any induced response from a social network. Occasionally, I feel a yearning to cry. There doesn’t have to be anything particularly sad or stressful in my life, at least not something I can consciously pinpoint, yet the conviction that I am burdened by a weight only a good cry could relieve remains. I’ll turn to sad movies, or in times of desperation when I am in need of a quick fix, short films on Youtube. And it generally works — crying is cathartic.

Catharsis — derived from katharsis, a Greek medical term for purification — was the original intent of Ancient Greek plays and tragedies. By evoking pity and fear, audiences might have related the story’s tragic hero. These performances ultimately encouraged spectators to reflect on their own societal and moral values through their emotional connection to the story.  While modern cinematic pieces I’ve consumed like the rom-com “Me Before You” and the TV show “One Day” did not feel serious enough to invoke philosophical ponderings, they did make me bawl my eyes out, an experience a spectator of Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” might relate to. 

But, in cases when a tragic story is not unfolding in front of me, it can be harder to deduce the cause of my tears. In a computer science course last fall when I was working on a lab assignment with two classmates and we kept running into communication problems about who was going to upload our work to GitHub, I did not expect to start crying. Yet, there was something so amusing about our circular conversation that giggles started to escape me. Despite knowing that it was not a socially acceptable time to start laughing, and maybe because of that, I couldn’t contain my laughter, which in turn, quickly led to tears. At some point, I realized that I was crying a bit more than I was laughing, and I found that I simply could not stop. To my horror, I surmised that my male labmates had perceived my laughter as sobs, as if our delay in completing the assignment had truly upset me. 

It’s sufficient to say that the public perception of my tears was the opposite of what I wanted, despite the biological theories that would imply that, especially as a woman, my crying was an attempt to receive emotional support from my labmates. And while I do not subscribe to gender based notions of who can and cannot cry, I will admit that had one of them started to cry, I would have been uncomfortable because I wouldn’t have known how to react.

While previous generations of humans did not have to deal with the intricacies of pushing and pulling from GitHub, the underlying basis of expressing emotion seems to have remained the same. As Anne Brontë wrote in 1848, “I often cry when I am happy and smile when I am sad.” Emotional theory refers to the counterintuitive expression of emotions, such as crying when we are happy and smiling when we are mad, as dimorphous expressions of emotion. Interestingly, they can be perceived as a stronger indicator of the underlying emotion than more congruent expressions. For example, tears from happiness are perceived as indicating a greater level of true joy than simply smiling. But sometimes crying is even more nonsensical. Hasan can attest to that.

“In high school, I had just learned how to drive and I was driving somewhere and a squirrel crossed the road,” Hasan said. “I didn’t even hit the squirrel. I stopped right in front of it and then it crossed the road and I immediately started crying because I was like, ‘Why would you cross the road when there’s a car coming?’” 

Despite attempts by philosophers and scientists to rationalize human crying since the time of the Ancient Greeks, it seems that the reasons why we cry might remain a mystery. I hope it does. As a trait whose function can be traced evolutionarily to other mammals and whose exhibition by humans distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom, the allure of finding out why we cry may lie in our desire to find out what differentiates us as a human race. But I think that the power of a cry lies in its unpredictability. Sometimes the best cries are the ones when you don’t actually know why you are crying or even that you needed to in the first place. This element of the unknown contributes to the cathartic experience of crying.

Statement Columnist Molly Goldwasser can be reached at gomolly@umich.edu.

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