OmaniAdult Crying: Causes and Motivations

Tears in the Graeco- …, 2009

Crying can occur in a great variety of contexts, including fulfilment and happiness as well as failure, loss, and sadness or other negative feelings, such as anger and guilt. Despite such differences, we have tried to identify a unitary underlying psychological cause for crying: perceived helplessness. We explore the different crying situations, describing the basic cognitive ingredients and critical steps in the process leading to crying. We start from those situations which directly imply personal frustration and suffering, then we consider empathic crying, crying for joy, and ''aesthetic'' crying, i.e., crying elicited by aesthetic experiences. We try to show that all of them imply a common core: some frustration (anticipated, actual, or previous), one's attempt to resist, perceived helplessness, and surrender to frustration. Finally, we address both the psychological benefits and costs of crying, either expected or unexpected, showing their links with perceived helplessness.

Cognition & Emotion, 2002

This study was designed to determine the influence of crying-related variables and country characteristics on positive mood change after crying. It was hypothesized that mood change would be positively associated to crying frequency, Individualism-Collectivism, and the extent of gender empowerment in a country. Masculinity-Femininity and shame were expected to have a negative relation with mood change. Participants were 1680 male and 2323 female students from 30 countries who provided self-report data on their crying behavior. Although bivariate associations yielded inconsistent results, in a regression analysis Masculinity-Femininity, national income, shame, and crying frequency emerged as significant predictors of mood change, all in the anticipated direction. The results suggest that how one feels after a crying episode depends on how common crying is in one's culture and general feelings of shame over crying. It also seems that (perceptions of) role patterns may play an important part in the experience of mood change.

Personality and …, 2008

Many people report that crying relieves distress and is soothing; however, others report no change in mood after crying, and a minority of people even report worsened mood. What accounts for individual differences in the sequelae of crying? To examine this question, 196 adult Dutch women completed personality and clinical functioning measures, which were used to predict mood change after crying, as well as the frequency and ease of crying episodes. The personality characteristics of neuroticism, extraversion and empathy predicted variation in the frequency and ease of crying episodes, but did not predict mood change. Conversely, clinical characteristics were less related to the frequency and ease of crying episodes than to variation in mood change. Specifically, alexithymia, anhedonia, depression, and anxiety were associated with worsened post-crying mood. Individual difference characteristics are systematically related to different facets of crying. Implications for understanding the heterogeneity of adult crying are discussed.

Meeting of the International Society for …, 2007

The Perception of Crying in Women and Men: Angry Tears, Sad Tears, and the "Right Way" to Cry Cell phones. You never know what news a call might bring. And in a public place it can be difficult to get a handle on the roller-coaster of emotions that ensues. Chris is upset. News of the divorce is surprising, yet not totally unexpected. Making matters worse, the phone call comes at a restaurant while Chris sits with friends at the table, surrounded by a roomful of strangers. The news is too much. And then it happens-along with the growing anger, tears well up in Chris' eyes.

Annals of Psychology, 2022

The aim of two preliminary studies reported in the article was to identify the main reasons for crying and to create a set of situational vignettes that would refer to specific situations or events that potentially can make people cry. In Study 1 (n = 61), we asked participants to list six general reasons behind crying. In Study 2 (n = 70), participants were asked to identify specific situations in which people shed emotion-related tears. As a result, we selected a set of 34 situational vignettes. Each of them is a short and gender-neutral description of a specific emotional reason that can make people cry and is related to one of the following basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, or fear. The vignettes can be used to manipulate the emotional basis of tears in experimental research.

Cross-Cultural Research, 2011

Results of a cross-cultural study of adult crying across 37 countries are presented. Analyses focused on country differences in recency of last crying episode and crying proneness and relationships with country characteristics. Three hypotheses on the nature of country differences in crying were evaluated: (a) distress due to exposure to taxing conditions, (b) norms regarding emotional expressiveness, and (c) personality (at country level). Individuals living in more affluent, democratic, extraverted, and individualistic countries tend to report to cry more often. These indicators relate to freedom of expression rather than to suffering; therefore, our data provide support for a model that views country differences in crying as being connected with country differences in expressiveness and personality rather than in distress. Gender differences in crying proneness were larger in wealthier, more democratic, and feminine countries. Differences in the meaning of crying at individual le...

The Spanish journal of psychology, 2012

This study has three objectives: a) to describe the main differences in the crying patterns produced by the three affective states most closely related to crying: fear, anger and pain; b) to study the adults' accuracy in the recognition of the affective states related to the infant's crying, and c) to analyze the emotional reaction that infant crying elicits in the observers. Results reveal that the main differences appear in the ocular activity and in the pattern of weeping. The infants maintain their eyes open during the crying produced by fear and anger, but in the case of crying provoked by painful stimuli, the eyes remain closed almost all the time. In regard to the pattern of weeping, the crying gradually increase in the case of anger, but the weeping reaches its maximum intensity practically from the beginning in the case of pain and fear. In spite of these differences, it is not easy to know the cause that produces crying in infants, especially in the case of fear or...

Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and mainly human phenomenon. The persistence of this behavior throughout adulthood has fascinated and puzzled many researchers. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue that binds individuals together and triggers social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were typically conducted only across Western participants, resulting in limited generalizability. The present study examines this effect across 36 countries spanning all populated continents, providing the most comprehensive investigation of the social effects of tearful crying to-date. Next to testing possible mediating factors, we also examine a number of moderating factors, including the crier’s gender and group membership, the situational valence (positive or negative situations), the social context (in private or public settings), the perceived ...