Crying threshold and intensity in major depressive disorder

Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 2007

Is there a relationship between depression and crying? A review. Objective: To conduct a systematic examination of the relationship between depression and crying by reviewing all relevant theory and empirical data including the performance of crying items in measures of depression. Method: Review of the extant literature on depression and crying using PubMed, PsychInfo and Google Scholar databases. Results: Scores on crying items of depression inventories correlate moderately with overall depression severity. Otherwise, there is surprisingly little evidence for the widespread claim that depression leads to more frequent and/or easier crying. There is also little empirical support for the competing claim that severely depressed individuals lose their capacity to cry. Conclusion: Current claims about the relationship between depression and crying lack a robust empirical foundation. Assessment instruments and diagnostic systems for mood disorders are inconsistent in how they handle crying as a symptom. Further work to investigate the causes and the context of crying in depressed patients is needed.

Emotion, 2007

Theorists have staked out two ostensibly opposing views of human crying as either an arousing behavior that signals distress or a soothing behavior that reduces arousal after distress. The present study examined whether these views of crying might be reconciled by attending to physiological changes that unfold over crying episodes. Sixty female students watched neutral and cry-eliciting films while autonomic physiology, including respiratory sinus arrhythmia and pre-ejection period, was assessed. Crying participants exhibited heart rate increases that rapidly subsided after crying onset. Crying onset was also associated with increases in respiratory sinus arrhythmia and slowed breathing. All crying effects subsided by 4 minutes after onset. It is possible that crying is both an arousing distress signal and a means to restore psychological and physiological balance, depending on how and when this complex behavior is interrogated.

Depression and Anxiety, 2008

Clinical commentators widely interpret crying as a sign of depressed mood. However, there is virtually no empirical data on this topic, and the evidence that mood disorders alter crying is surprisingly weak. This study compared mood disordered patients to a nonpsychiatric reference group on the frequency, antecedents, and consequences of crying behavior using a well-validated questionnaire measure of crying. Forty-four outpatients diagnosed with three forms of mood pathology were age and gender matched to a reference group of 132 participants sampled to be representative of the Dutch population. Both groups completed the Adult Crying Inventory, which provides estimates of the self-reported frequency, antecedents, and consequences of crying behavior. Depression severity and psychiatric symptom severity data were also collected from patients. Compared with the reference group, patients with mood pathology reported increased cry proneness to negative antecedents. By contrast, patients and controls did not differ in reported cry proneness to positive antecedents. Patients reported less mood improvement after crying than did controls. Among male patients, but not female patients, depression severity was associated with increased crying proneness and increased crying frequency. This pilot investigation suggests that mood disorders increase the frequency of negative emotional crying, and may also alter the functions of this behavior. Mood disorders may influence male crying to a greater extent than female crying. Future directions designed to clarify the causal pathways between mood disorders and alterations in crying behavior are discussed. Depression and Anxiety 25:E9-E15, 2008.

Psychophysiology, 2003

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is an index of the vagal control of heart rate that is associated with emotion regulatory capacity. To examine RSA in depressed and nondepressed participants in the context of an emotionregulatory challenge, we presented a sad film to induce crying, a behavior associated with heightened parasympathetic activation. We predicted that nondepressed persons who cried would show elevations in RSA during the onset and the resolution of crying. By contrast, we predicted that depressed individuals who cried would fail to exhibit increased RSA over the course of their crying episodes. As hypothesized, nondepressed participants exhibited RSA increases that accompanied the resolution of tearful crying, consistent with a homeostatic function for crying, whereas depressed subjects who cried did not exhibit increased RSA. Results suggest that the physiological self-regulatory mechanisms invoked by crying are compromised in depression.

Psychological Topics, 2007

Journal of Research in Personality, 2011

We aimed to examine the connections between individual affective characteristics and crying, and to evaluate Rottenberg, Bylsma, and Vingerhoets’ (2008) framework for studying crying and mood. We analyzed the relationship among features of the social environment, mood characteristics of the crier, crying frequency/urge to cry, and mood change across 1004 detailed crying episodes sampled from 97 females. Urge to cry

Motivation and Emotion, 2015

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