engleski

Inter-personal functions and intra-personal byproducts of emotional crying

Despite recent advancements in the research on emotional crying or tearing, this universal, but also uniquely human behavior is still a poorly understood phenomenon. Major breakthrough in the understanding of emotional tears might come from the research inspired by evolutionary approach, especially because crying seems to have appeared very recently in the human evolution, and as such, its functions must be closely linked to aspects of social life that are specific to humans. Lay people often consider crying primarily as a self-soothing behavior, especially when it is assessed retroactively. Unsurprisingly, earlier scientific accounts on crying focused primarily on its potential beneficial effects on somatic and psychological health. However, research based on such premises yielded highly inconsistent results, prompting researchers to turn their attention towards inter-individual effects of tears. Recent theoretical accounts provided a solid basis for the understanding of the evolved inter-personal functions of tears and offered new models that integrate inter- and-intra individual effects of crying into a single theoretical framework. In this talk, I will first present an overview of the existing theoretical accounts on the evolution of emotional crying. Next, I will present the most recent theoretical reasoning and research supporting the claims that tears are an emotional expression or signal that (a) works through visual (rather than olfactory) channel, (b) that evolved during a recent human past as a means of transferring information, primarily those in the realm of attachment processes and help/nurturance seeking, as well as in domains of submission/dominance and signaling friendly intentions, (c) that, as a rule, elicits positive reactions in observers, and (d) that may have certain beneficial consequences for the crying individual primarily via responses from others, and possibly via metabolic changes that facilitate the fulfilment of its signaling function. In order to provide more detailed insight into the methodological approach in this area, I will briefly present several examples of the specific studies made by our research group, that provide support for the above stated claims. These include the research on the olfactory effects of tears on sexual behavior, visual effects of tears on aggression reduction and approach-avoidance tendencies, their interaction with muscular facial expressions, and the effects of crying in the context of welfare tradeoff ratio.

tears ; crying ; evolution ; adaptation ; byproduct ; signal ; mood

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