Crying

Abstract

Crying, which Medical Subject Headings classifies under language development as the earliest prelinguistic vocalization, is the production of tears and distinctive vocal and facial expression in response to emotional states. It is the one expressive behavior that appears to be uniquely human in its emotional, tear-shedding form, and cognitive psychology studies it on three fronts: as a graded signal whose acoustic form conveys the degree of a crier's distress, as a putative mood-regulation behavior whose benefits turn out to be strongly conditional, and as an interpersonal signal that recruits social cognition in observers and solicits their support. Contemporary evidence overturns the folk belief that a good cry reliably relieves distress: self-reported mood improvement follows crying only when it is met with comfort and resolves the situation, and the measured association between crying and mood relief is small.

Keywords: crying, emotional tears, mood regulation, emotional expression, social signaling

Crying is the shedding of tears together with a characteristic vocalization and facial configuration, occurring in response to emotional states ranging from grief and pain to tenderness and joy. It is among the most conspicuous human expressive behaviors and, in its emotional tear-shedding form, is widely argued to be species-specific: other animals vocalize in distress and produce tears to protect the eye, but emotional weeping appears to be peculiar to humans (Vingerhoets, 2013). For cognitive psychology the behavior poses a cluster of questions that cut across emotion, development, and social cognition. Why does an internal emotional state produce an outward, visible signal at all? Does crying serve the self, by regulating the crier's own emotional state, or others, by communicating need and soliciting help? And why is the everyday conviction that crying brings relief so poorly supported when the behavior is measured rather than remembered? The article treats crying first as an expressive act, then as a candidate mood-regulation mechanism, and finally as an interpersonal signal.

What Crying Is

Crying is defined by the co-occurrence of three components: the secretion of emotional tears, a species-typical vocalization that in adults is often suppressed, and a facial expression centered on the brow and mouth (Vingerhoets & Bylsma, 2016). Human tears are usually divided into three kinds by their eliciting condition: basal tears that continuously lubricate the eye, reflex tears that flush irritants, and emotional tears produced in response to affective states. Only the third is crying in the psychological sense, and only the third appears to be distinctively human. Charles Darwin, who devoted a chapter of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals to weeping, treated emotional tears as an incidental by-product of the muscular contraction around the eyes during distress, a position later researchers have largely rejected in favor of accounts that assign tears a communicative function (Hasson, 2009).

A central puzzle is why crying produces a visible external signal. An emotional state could in principle be regulated internally with no outward trace; instead crying overflows onto the face, where others can see it. This observation motivates the dominant contemporary view that crying is as much a communicative behavior as an expressive one, and that its visible tears in particular evolved to signal need and to constrain aggression by making the crier appear vulnerable and non-threatening (Hasson, 2009). The behavior therefore sits at the intersection of emotion regulation and social signaling, and the two functions are difficult to disentangle because a single episode can serve both at once. The demonstrations below separate the signal, the self-regulation question, and the interpersonal effect in turn.

Figure 1

Crying as a Dual-Function Behavior

Why Humans Cry

The developmental and evolutionary starting point is infant crying, which is present at birth and is the newborn's principal means of acting on its caregivers. James Soltis analyzed early infant crying as a graded, honest signal of need: its acoustic properties — fundamental frequency, intensity, and the proportion of time spent crying — scale with the infant's level of distress, and because sustained crying is metabolically costly and risks attracting predators, it is difficult to fake, which is what makes it a reliable cue a caregiver can act on (Soltis, 2004). Debra Zeifman framed the same behavior through Tinbergen's four questions, distinguishing the immediate causes of a cry from its developmental course, its adaptive function, and its evolutionary history, and emphasized that infant crying is best understood as an attachment behavior that maintains caregiver proximity (Zeifman, 2001). The first demonstration lets the reader vary an infant's distress and observe how the acoustic signal and the modeled urgency of the caregiver's response change with it.

Adult emotional crying is harder to place evolutionarily, and several complementary proposals exist. One holds that visible tears evolved specifically as a signal of appeasement and need, blurring vision and so credibly advertising helplessness in a way that inhibits aggression and recruits care (Hasson, 2009). Robert Provine and colleagues argued that emotional tearing is a uniquely human visual signal layered on top of the older vocal cry, a breakthrough that allowed silent, close-range communication of emotional state (Provine et al., 2009). These signaling accounts share the premise that the function of adult crying is primarily interpersonal, whatever intrapersonal effects it may also have.

Does Crying Improve Mood

The most durable lay belief about crying is that it is cathartic — that releasing tears discharges pent-up emotion and leaves the crier feeling better. When this hypothesis is tested, it fails in its strong form. Retrospective surveys, in which people recall how crying generally makes them feel, do tend to report benefit; but studies that capture crying closer to the moment it happens find that most episodes are followed by no mood improvement or by worsened mood, and that reported relief is the exception rather than the rule (Rottenberg et al., 2008). The discrepancy is itself informative: the belief in catharsis is sustained partly by a memory bias, because the salient, resolved cries that did bring relief are better remembered and more available than the many that did not (Bylsma et al., 2008).

When crying does relieve mood, it does so conditionally. A daily-diary study of more than a thousand crying episodes found that mood improvement was reported mainly when the crier received social support during the episode and when the crying was associated with resolution of the precipitating problem, and not when the crying occurred alone or failed to change the situation (Bylsma et al., 2011). A meta-analytic review reconciling the laboratory and field findings concluded that crying's effect on mood is small, variable, and dependent on context, interpersonal and otherwise, rather than an automatic hydraulic discharge (Gračanin et al., 2015). A related proposal is that crying functions as a self-soothing behavior that helps restore physiological and psychological equilibrium after a period of high arousal, which would predict benefit on a slower timescale than the immediate relief the catharsis story assumes (Gračanin et al., 2014). The second demonstration lets the reader toggle these conditions and watch the predicted mood trajectory change.

The Social Functions of Tears

If the intrapersonal benefits of crying are weak and conditional, its interpersonal effects are robust and are now the center of gravity of the field. Adult crying reliably changes how observers perceive and respond to the crier. Experiments that present faces with and without tears find that visible tears increase the perceived sadness of the face and increase observers' willingness to offer support, so that the tears function as a help-soliciting signal (Hendriks et al., 2008). A large cross-national investigation spanning forty-one countries confirmed that this effect generalizes widely: seeing another person's tears raises the intention to provide social support, consistent with the view that emotional tears evolved as a signal that recruits care (Zickfeld et al., 2023). The effect is not unconditional — the perceived appropriateness of the crying and the relationship between crier and observer modulate it — but the core finding, that tears solicit support, is one of the more reliable results in the literature.

The physiology of crying is consistent with this signaling account. The act of emotional crying is accompanied by a shift in autonomic balance, with parasympathetic activity increasing in the period around and after an episode, a pattern compatible with crying functioning to restore calm and to signal a non-threatening state rather than to prepare for action (Bylsma et al., 2019). The third demonstration makes the signaling function concrete, letting the reader vary the visibility of tears on a schematic face and observe the modeled shift in perceived sadness and in an observer's intention to help.

Table 1

Three Functional Accounts of Human Crying

Note. The three accounts are complementary rather than mutually exclusive; a single crying episode can serve more than one function.

Worked Example

The claim that crying's effect on mood is small is a claim about effect size, and reading it correctly matters because a small effect is easy to overstate. Effect sizes for the association between crying and subsequent mood change are typically reported as correlation coefficients, and the most intuitive way to interpret a correlation is to square it, giving the proportion of variance in one variable that is statistically accounted for by the other.

Consider an illustrative correlation of r = 0.20 between crying and reported mood relief, a value in the range the literature describes as small. Squaring it gives r² = 0.20 × 0.20 = 0.04, so the crying–mood association accounts for about 4% of the variance in mood change, leaving roughly 96% to everything else — whether support was received, whether the problem resolved, the crier's disposition, and measurement noise. Halve the correlation to r = 0.10 and the variance explained falls to r² = 0.01, or 1%. Double it to a medium r = 0.30 and it rises only to r² = 0.09, or 9%. The arithmetic shows why the honest summary is that crying is, at most, a minor and context-dependent contributor to how a person feels afterward (Gračanin et al., 2015), not the reliable release the catharsis story promises. The illustrative values here are chosen to span the small-to-medium range; the point is the squaring, which converts a modest-sounding correlation into a still more modest share of explained variance.

Discussion

The study of crying illustrates a recurring lesson in the psychology of emotion: a behavior's felt purpose and its measured function can diverge sharply. People cry believing it will make them feel better, and remember it having done so, yet moment-to-moment measurement shows the benefit is small and conditional. Resolving that paradox has shifted the field's center of gravity from the intrapersonal, catharsis-driven question toward the interpersonal, signaling question, where the findings are far more robust. Tears reliably recruit support; crying only sometimes relieves the crier, and chiefly when it succeeds in recruiting that support or in resolving the situation. The two functions are thus linked: the clearest route by which crying improves mood may be the social response it elicits rather than any direct discharge of emotion.

This reframing also clarifies the clinical significance of crying. Because crying is tied to mood regulation and social connection, atypical crying — whether its frequency, its controllability, or the relief it brings — can be a marker of affective disturbance, and clinicians attend to changes in a patient's crying as they would to other emotional signals (Bylsma, 2021). The behavior that a reductive clinical summary might record as a symptom is, on closer inspection, a window onto how a person is regulating emotion and whether their bids for support are being met.

Current Directions

Three strands dominate current work. The first is the large-scale, cross-cultural study of tears as a social signal: the forty-one-country investigation of whether seeing tears raises the intention to help is an example of the field testing the generality of the signaling account rather than its existence, and of using preregistered, multi-site designs to do so (Zickfeld et al., 2023). The second is the neurobiology of crying, still comparatively underdeveloped, which seeks the central and autonomic mechanisms that produce emotional tears and distinguishes them from reflex tearing; mapping this circuitry is a prerequisite for understanding the pathological crying seen in some neurological conditions (Bylsma et al., 2019). The third is the translation of crying research into clinical practice, using what is known about the conditional, socially embedded nature of crying's benefits to interpret crying in therapy rather than to assume that a patient's tears are inherently relieving (Bylsma, 2021). Across all three, the methodological trend is away from retrospective self-report and toward measurement that captures crying nearer to when it occurs.

Common Misconceptions

A good cry always makes a person feel better.

Measured near the moment it happens, most crying is followed by no mood improvement or by worsened mood; relief is reported mainly when the crier is comforted and the situation resolves (Bylsma et al., 2011). The belief persists because the resolved, comforted cries that did bring relief are the ones people remember (Rottenberg et al., 2008).

Crying discharges a built-up reservoir of emotion.

The hydraulic, catharsis picture is not supported; the association between crying and mood change is small and strongly context-dependent rather than an automatic release (Gračanin et al., 2015). Where crying helps, the mechanism appears to be social and gradual, not a discharge.

Tears are just a by-product with no function.

Darwin's view that emotional tears are an incidental by-product has given way to evidence that visible tears are a communicative signal: they raise perceived sadness and others' intention to offer support (Hendriks et al., 2008). The by-product framing survives as a historical position, not a current one.

Glossary

Attachment Behavior.

An action, such as infant crying, that functions to maintain proximity to a caregiver and to recruit their protection and care.

Basal Tears.

The continuous tear film that lubricates and protects the surface of the eye, unrelated to emotion.

Catharsis.

The supposed purging or release of emotion through its expression; the folk model of crying that measurement does not support in its strong form.

Effect Size.

A standardized measure of the magnitude of an association; for crying and mood it is small, so the behaviors account for little of each other's variance.

Emotion.

An affective state with physiological, expressive, and experiential components; crying is one of its most visible expressions.

Emotional Tears.

Tears produced in response to affective states rather than to eye irritation; the tears of crying in the psychological sense, apparently unique to humans.

Facial Expression.

The configuration of facial muscles that accompanies an emotional state; the crying face centers on the brow and mouth and, with tears, forms the crying signal.

Graded Signal.

A signal whose intensity varies continuously with the state it conveys; infant crying is graded, so its acoustic form indicates the degree of distress.

Help-Soliciting Signal.

A display that recruits aid from others; visible tears act as one, raising observers' intention to offer support.

Honest Signal.

A signal that is costly or hard to fake and therefore reliably reflects the sender's true state; sustained infant crying is costly and so is honest.

Infant Behavior.

The behavioral repertoire of the human infant; crying is its earliest and principal means of acting on caregivers.

Reflex Tears.

Tears that flush irritants from the eye, triggered by physical rather than emotional stimuli; distinct from the tears of crying.

Retrospective Report.

An account given from memory of how one generally feels; for crying it overstates benefit relative to measurement taken near the episode.

Self-Soothing.

Behavior that restores physiological and psychological equilibrium after high arousal; a proposed, slow-acting function of crying.

Social Cognition.

The processing of information about other people; crying recruits it in observers who read the tears and infer the crier's need.

Key Researchers

Lauren M. Bylsma

. Associate professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh; her diary and laboratory studies established that crying's mood benefits are conditional on social support and resolution, and she reviews the clinical implications of crying research. ORCID

Randolph R. Cornelius

. Professor of psychological science at Vassar College; he has written extensively on the psychology of weeping and the history of theories of crying. ORCID

Charles Darwin

(1809-1882). English naturalist whose The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) gave the first systematic scientific treatment of weeping, framing emotional tears as a by-product of distress. Wikipedia - Wikidata

Asmir Gračanin

. Emotion researcher at the University of Rijeka; his meta-analytic and experimental work developed the self-soothing account of crying and clarified when crying does and does not relieve mood. ORCID

Robert R. Provine

(1943-2019). Neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; he studied involuntary human behaviors and argued that emotional tearing is a uniquely human visual signal layered on the vocal cry. Wikidata

Jonathan Rottenberg

. Professor of psychology at the University of South Florida; his work on emotion and depression includes influential analyses of whether, and when, crying is beneficial. Faculty Page

Ad J. J. M. Vingerhoets

. Professor at Tilburg University and the leading contemporary researcher on human crying; his book Why Only Humans Weep synthesizes the evolutionary, developmental, and social evidence on tears. ORCID

Debra M. Zeifman

. Developmental psychobiologist at Vassar College; her ethological analysis applied Tinbergen's four questions to infant crying and framed it as an attachment behavior. Faculty Page

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do humans cry emotional tears?

The dominant view is that visible emotional tears evolved as a signal of need and vulnerability that recruits support from others and inhibits aggression, making crying as much a communicative act as an expressive one (Hasson, 2009).

Does crying actually make people feel better?

Not reliably; most crying measured near the moment it happens is followed by no mood improvement or by worse mood, and relief is reported mainly when the crier receives support and the situation resolves (Bylsma et al., 2011).

Why do people believe crying is cathartic if the evidence is weak?

Retrospective reports, given from memory, emphasize the salient, resolved cries that did bring relief, so remembered benefit exceeds what moment-to-moment measurement shows (Rottenberg et al., 2008).

Are emotional tears unique to humans?

Emotional, tear-shedding crying appears to be species-specific to humans; other animals vocalize in distress and produce tears to protect the eye, but weeping from emotion is not documented in them (Vingerhoets, 2013).

What is an infant's cry communicating?

Infant crying is a graded, honest signal whose acoustic form scales with the degree of distress, functioning as an attachment behavior that maintains caregiver proximity and recruits care (Soltis, 2004).

How do tears affect the people who see them?

Visible tears increase the perceived sadness of a face and increase observers' intention to offer support, an effect that generalizes across many cultures (Zickfeld et al., 2023).

Is there a difference between emotional tears and reflex tears?

Yes; reflex tears flush irritants from the eye in response to physical stimuli, whereas emotional tears are produced in response to affective states and constitute crying in the psychological sense (Vingerhoets & Bylsma, 2016).

Can crying be clinically significant?

Because crying is tied to mood regulation and social connection, changes in its frequency, controllability, or the relief it brings can mark affective disturbance, and clinicians attend to crying as an emotional signal (Bylsma, 2021).

References