Speaking of Psychology - Why do we cry? With Lauren Bylsma, PhD

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Pain, sadness, joy, awe – under the right circumstances, any of these emotions can bring on tears. Lauren Bylsma, PhD, talks about why crying evolved, the psychological and social purposes of tears, why some people cry more easily than others, and whether having a good cry can make you feel better when you’re sad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. A beautiful sunset, a skinned knee, a sad movie, a pungent onion. What do all of these things have in common? Any of them might, under the right circumstances, make you cry. In recent years, psychologists and other researchers have begun digging into the psychology and neurobiology of crying, testing out the truth behind common myths about tears and learning more about why we cry. So what does psychological purpose or purposes of crying? What do tears of sadness and tears of joy have in common, and how do they differ? Does having a good cry really make you feel better when you're sad or upset? Why do some people cry more easily than others? And if you're in a situation where you don't want to

cry, is it possible to stop yourself from doing so? And is that a good thing? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that exists. the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Lauren Bilesma, a licensed clinical psychologist and an associate professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. She's been studying crying for nearly two decades and has done research on the neurobiology

of crying, the social and psychological functions of tears and crying in therapy. She also studies emotion regulation and mood and anxiety disorders, including emotional functioning in depression and cognitive behavioral therapy for mood, anxiety, and schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Dr. Bosma, thank you for joining me today. Thank you for having me. Let's start with a question that I asked in the intro, which is, why do we cry? What purpose or purposes do tears serve?

Yeah, so it's a complicated question. So you mentioned a few types of tears in the overview. So there are the basal tears which lubricate the eye, which humans and all animals have. these or most animals, then there's the reflexive tears that might be in response to something irritating like cutting an onion. But I think the tears that we're most interested in talking about today, which is the focus of my work is the emotional tears, which are in response to an emotional situation. So in terms of the emotional tears, people vary in the types of things that they cry to, but it seems to be specific to a really intense emotional response, which could be

something negative, really distressing or sad or something really positive or awe-inspiring as well, but all involving really intense emotional experience. So you mentioned a couple of common reasons why people cry. Is there anything that almost universally makes people cry? Yeah, that's a good question. It's a little more variable in adults, but among babies and children, they will cry in response to pain or other forms of distress. There are some adults that may report never crying as an adult. are very rarely crying, but I would say at least developmentally in those early stages, that is pretty universal, that pain or distress. Now, crying among infants is different, though, isn't it?

I mean, they don't initially produce tears, correct? That's right. In the very early stages before the lacquimile ducks fully form in the first few weeks, there's no physical tears, but there is the vocalizations and the sounds that the infants make. Does everyone cry? I mean, why do some people cry more easily than other? Yeah, there's a lot of different factors that might contribute to how often someone cries. There are certainly some adults that report never crying at all.

That seems to be somewhat rare, and it might be that they don't remember times that they cried or they might be less willing to admit it. So that hasn't been fully verified if that is the case, if there's some people who literally never cry, at least in terms of emotional tears, those people would still cry, you know, if they were to cut an onion or something like that. There are some people who may be have a disease of the lacrimal glands who might not be able to produce tears, but might experience other things that go along with crying. But there are a number of factors. One of them is biological sex, so women cry three to five times more than men.

And that's something we've seen across all different cultures. And there's a number of reasons for that. Part of it could be women in general tend to be more emotionally expressive than men. So there may be some cultural influence. But because we also see that across the world, there's probably some other biological reasons as well, perhaps neurological differences or hormones, but we don't really know the exact reasons. Those are kind of speculative. Are there cultural differences in crying? Have you looked across various nationalities, for example? Yeah, there was a study, a large survey across the world of crying conducted in 2008. And there were some subtle differences across different. cultures, but overall, there was actually really striking similarity as well.

Are there other factors involved in men crying less than women, such as biological or physiological reasons? Yeah, there are likely some biological reasons. We haven't studied those yet to know exactly what they are, but we know that there's a number of biological differences between men and women. There are probably some socio-cultural factors as well. I think things are kind of improving in present times, but I think that, men have often been, like, socialized to not cry as crying as being seen as something weak or

vulnerable, and men have been more discouraged to cry compared to women, although I think there's some improvement in that area. Why do we cry tears of joy, and are they different somehow from the other types of tears that we might shed? Yeah, that's a good question. So tears of joy tend to be a bit less common than tears toward more distressing or negative stimuli. So most of the research has been focused on crying in response to distressing stimuli.

lie. For example, I don't know of any laboratory studies that have been able to induce positive tears. It's much more difficult to induce that. It's usually something really personally relevant, like someone gets married or has a baby or wins Olympic competition. Or some people might also respond to a beautiful artwork or a beautiful sunset. Some people are more sensitive to that type of positive response than others. But we don't really know anything about whether or not the biological mechanisms differ. What we do know is a common factor is that the emotion is intense and they have, you know, experience of physiological arousal in that moment where they're positive or negative is associated with crying, but it has to be a highly intense emotion. You talked a moment ago

about crying in the lab. How do you get people to cry in the lab and are there ethical considerations around doing that? Yeah, yeah. So my graduate school mentor, John Rottenberg, did some of that work. And, you know, I've worked on other studies where we elicited various emotions in the lab. And this is typically done with emotional films. So we used, one of the clips that was used was the champ. It's kind of an older film now. So I don't know if people are familiar with it, but it's the scene where the little boy is crying over the man who has died. And it's a pretty intense scene.

And I think in response to seeing the little boy cry and being in significant distress, it does often induce tears in people. But the problem with this is these are movies. Most people, when they're crying in daily life or not, some people might be watching sad movies, but most people are crying a more personally relevant situation. So it's really hard to replicate these in the lab. It's not really feasible. And like you mentioned, ethics, they'd also be kind of unethical to replicate some of these specific types of scenarios in the lab. But currently in some of my current work, we've been looking at using ambulatory methods in daily life.

So using surveys on smartphones in combination with ambulatory physiosensors, so like passive sensing where people wear a device that can monitor cardiac activity, for example. And so we're currently trying to get more information about things that happen in the real world that I think will be particularly elucidating here. So if I were going to volunteer to be in one of your experiments, right, I have to sign a form that says, I agree to be made miserable in your laboratory. so I will weep. Yeah, so we haven't been doing the laboratory studies more recently because I think really

where we can move forward more is doing it in daily life. But yes, you have to have people consent and say they are going to be watching emotional stimuli and that they could be experiencing strong emotional responses. You definitely would have to tell people that as well. Which might also influence their responses. It's also artificial in that, you know, the experimenters are watching you. You're probably being videotaped. It's really awkward.

and uncomfortable, and almost everyone reports feeling worse after crying in the lab. But in daily life, people more often report feeling better. So it's just not a good representation, I think, of what people are experiencing in real life. So that's common then, like having a good cry really does make you feel better? Yeah, it varies quite a bit, but there's definitely a good portion of people that report feeling better. It seems to depend on the social context. And the rates at which people report whether it's better or not vary based on how we ask. So if we just ask the general measure, do people think they feel better after crying, the majority report feeling better. But if we ask them about a very specific episode, then it goes down a bit. And then if we ask them like in the

moment, like right after they cried, then it goes down a bit more. So it seems to really, there might be some like bias and perception about crying when people are just thinking about it overall. Maybe certain ones stand out to them more than others. Maybe the crying takes longer for it to become beneficial, so maybe it doesn't happen right away. But it does seem that there's definitely a subset of situations in which people feel better after crying, and the social piece seems to be particularly important. So if people cry in a supportive social environment, they're much more likely to feel better after crying. So it might be that it's really the social piece that's making them feel better, not necessarily the crying itself, but there's also examples. A lot of people

cry alone, for example, and many people who cry alone also report feeling better. And one theoretical viewpoint is that the crying forces you to think about whatever's bothering you. So if you're crying, you can't really think about anything else. It kind of forces you to deal with it. Maybe you've been avoiding it and not thinking about it. But when you're crying about it, you have to think about it. So it might force you to reach a new kind of cognitive understanding of whatever it is that was bothering you. What areas of the brain are involved in crying? Is there some central location and are the tears that you, tears of distress, are they controlled in the same part of the brain as the tears of joy? Yeah, I wish we had that research. There's remarkably

been no neuroimaging studies of crying, emotional crying in humans. And so we don't know, but what I would suspect is given the strong ties to emotion, likely the other parts of the brain involved in emotion would be active. But similar to effective neuroscience research in general, we can't really separate positive and negative emotions very well in the brain. So it would likely involve some common regions like the amygdala, for example, that are involved in both positive and negative emotions, as well as parts of the central autonomic network that are involved in emotion expression and other like physiological processes underlying emotion. There are some specific reward regions of the brain, like the striatum that might be specific

to positive things, but we don't really, we haven't studied this in the context. of crying. There has been some comparative biology research with animals making alarm cries, and it does seem like that there may be some emotional areas of the brain involved in that, like the amygdala as well as parts of the brain like the midbrain. But that's just a guess based on animal studies of distressed vocalizations. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill for-burner gas grill on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499.

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Hilton, for the stay. Speaking of vocalizations, why do we humans sometimes vocalize when we cry and other times not? Yeah, the vocalizations are associated with more intense crying. I think usually when people are crying, they might want not everyone to hear about it, so they would probably usually avoid vocalizing if they're in a public situation. But maybe if they're at home, they might be more comfortable vocalizing,

or if the crying is just so intense that they can't control the vocalization, it does seem to be associated with the intensity of the crime. And you mentioned studying other animals to understand this. emotion, but other animals don't cry, correct? I mean, there is some people think that they do and you can go on TikTok and see videos and, oh, that's that dog is crying, but dogs don't really shed tears. I mean, does any other animal cry, even primates? Right. Yeah, it's a good question. Now, I haven't worked directly with animals in my own research, but it has thought that crying in humans evolved initially from distress calls and other animals, but that it seemed to further develop in

humans to have additional functions beyond the initial function was just so that the infant could get caregiving from its parent or to warn other other peers in your group of potential danger. So those were the initial biological functions. But humans, as we became more complex and have more complex social groups, crying seem to develop more other social types of functions as well because we do continue to cry in adulthood where there's other animals are more likely to show these cries in infancy. see. But based on the evidence we have, there doesn't seem to be evidence, any strong evidence that animals have emotional crying. There have been like some isolated case studies where people

have made these claims, but the only more systematic study that's been conducted of zookeepers to ask them about crime, their animals did not reveal any significant evidence of emotional crying in animals. So where we do see that animals might produce some tears, it's probably a more form their eyes irritated and more form of reflexive tear or maybe if they're doing a lot of motor movements, maybe it's squeezing out more liquid from the eyes because of a physical response and not from an emotional response. Is there anything contagious about crying? I mean, if you're in a place where, you know, you're at a funeral and somebody starts crying and pretty soon, you know, the whole room is crying. Is there that kind of psychological contagion to crying? Yeah. Well, I think

there's a couple pieces to it. One is if other people are crying, you might from more crying, but also one of the main triggers for crying is empathy. So when you're saying other people cry, like in that video clip I mentioned earlier, there's the child's crying there, you're going to be more likely to experience. It's going to help elicit that empathetic response. If someone's crying, you really can see how distressed they are. It's really visible. And so that might be more likely to elicit that crying in you as well. You know, people often feel quite self-conscious about crying. I mean, it doesn't, it's not something that's necessarily valued in social situations.

Are people seen as weaker or less competent when they're crying? Yeah, that can occur. So I think that's why people tend to prefer to cry or find it more helpful to cry when they're among individuals who provide more comforting reactions. So I think there are certain situations like if you're at the workplace where it's not considered great to cry in most situations in a work environment. There might be some exceptions to that. But most individuals will report having at least

Some people may be a partner or a best friend, like someone or a therapist, like someone that they feel safe crying in. And so usually there's quite a bit of variability. But some people might feel more comfortable than others. Some people might have been like criticized as a child for crying, especially boys. Or people who have undergone trauma, emotional abuse may be less comfortable crying because it shows a vulnerability to do that in front of others. I mentioned in the introduction that you've done some research into crying in therapy.

what have you looked at and what have you found? Yeah, so I haven't done that work directly, but I did a review paper on it of the studies that have been done. And the studies that have been done have all been relatively sort of small-scale studies based on self-reports. So the knowledge we have is limited. But I'm also a clinical psychologist and do therapy myself and have experienced, you know, like patients crying in therapy.

But I do think that crying is a really important part of the therapeutic process. It's often a place where patients feel most comfortable crying. in expressing their emotions. And being able to process your emotions in a safe environment is really important in therapy for a variety of mental health disorders, particularly for those who have experienced trauma, I think. And so I think by being able to cry in therapy and process those emotions in a helpful manner, that that is particularly important.

But in some of the research, we found that also not only do the patients often cry, but therapists sometimes cry as well. And that that can often be experienced positively by both therapists and patient as part of like that building that rapport and that connection, you know, if done in an appropriate way where you're not taking the attention, you know, away from the patient. But there's some differences in people have different modalities that they practice and some therapists might be more comfortable crying than others depending on, you know, the approach that they're taking.

What got you interested in studying crying? Yes, when I was in grad school, my graduate mentor, John Rottenberg, collaborated. with Advingerharts in the Netherlands. And he had just collected that big days that I mentioned earlier, and they were looking for students to help look at the data and write papers from it. And so that's where it all started. And it's always fascinating me how a few people in the world study crying, it's gotten better.

But it's still, given like, the ubiquity importance of human crying, it's still very surprising to me how little research is actually done and, like, how we have no neuroimaging studies, a human crying. And it certainly has its challenges, but I, you know, I'm surprised that there's like such a small number of people in the world studying it. So that's just kept me, you know, intrigued. It can be harder to get funding for studies of normal human behavior. Like most of my work is in mental health than from the NIH.

So it's much easier to get funding for things that are of public health significance, like mental health disorders. Whereas while crying might be associated mental health disorders, everyone cries. It's not a pathological thing. So I think part of it is it's harder to get like big grants to really study it too. are you yourself much of a cryer? Yeah, I would say I'm probably pretty average, yeah, in terms of that. But, yeah, I've noticed it varies over my life, too. Like sometimes in my life, maybe I would cry more easily than others.

I think for me as well as a lot of people, like if you're having more stress or not sleeping as well or just, you know, have too much going on that you might be more likely to cry than other times where, you know, things are going more smoothly. So that's another factor that might predict, you know, whether or not someone cries easily, too. Is there some kind of a metric people can use to know that their crying has moved into the danger zone if you cried too much? I mean, what's sort of an average? How often do people cry? Yeah.

If I remember correctly, I think women report cry maybe two to three times a month on average and men, it could be like zero to one. But the really important thing I want to impress is that there's no like a pathological. number, like if you cry this much, it's bad, or if you don't cry at all, it's bad. That's really important to keep in mind because sometimes people will email me and they'll be concerned. Like, I'm crying too much. What can I do? I'm not crying enough.

What's wrong with me? There's quite a bit of normal variation in human crying. And it's not anything to be concerned about unless it starts, if you feel like it's impacting your functioning, your ability to connect socially with others, if it's having a negative impact on your relationships, or if you feel like you're not able to healthily, express your emotions and deal with them in a helpful way, that's when it might be a concern. And maybe seeking something like psychotherapy can be helpful. But there's no magic number. Some people are perfectly comfortable not crying very much, whereas other people like to have

that experience of crying. So there's a lot of normal variation. What about suppressing crying? Can that be harmful to people? Yeah, there is some self-report evidence that suppressing tears can be harmful as well as chronically suppressing other emotions in general. Certainly there's some situations we have to do that to function in society. But overall, if you're chronically suppressing tears and your other emotions and you're not, you don't have any safe place to experience those emotions in a healthy manner, that that over time can be unhelpful. And so I would encourage people who are experiencing that to find more healthy outlets to be able to experience their emotion. Are there neurological or psychological disorders that make people cry more or make them

cry inappropriately? Yeah, so there is some evidence that people who have depression and anxiety might cry a bit more, but it's not a linear relationship. So because on the most severe end, people have more severe depression or really severe trauma might not cry at all because they experience more emotional numbing. And also some medications like SSRIs can increase the threshold decried. So if people aren't necessarily, they might not cry as much as they used to. There is a neurological condition called pathological crying or pseudovolular affect. It involves pathological crying or it can involve laughter too. But what we know of that, it seems to have different mechanisms and that the person is often not really experiencing an intense emotion. It's more of a

basic neurological thing in that it's not emotionally driven. But, but, But it's fairly rare disorders, so we don't know a whole lot about it. So what are you working on now and what research questions do you want to answer? You mentioned that we don't have a lot of neuroimaging of people crying. Is that something that you're looking to do, or are you working in other areas? Yeah, so neuroimaging studies are pretty expensive to fund. So that hasn't been my focus right now. But what I'm currently doing is I have a number of studies going on of doing ambulatory

physiology with daily self-reports of emotion. So I've added crying measures onto some of those ongoing studies so we can better understand the physiological correlates of crying in the real world and other factors too, like social factors or what types of things people are crying to. So I'm hoping this data will give us more information on how crying affects people in the real world. And one of my most recent studies is also in adults with autism where we're looking at emotional processes there where I've also added a crying measure too. Dr. Bosma, I want to thank you for joining me today. It's been interesting to chat with you.

Yeah, thank you. It's been great talking to you about this. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please follow us and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Wierman. Thank you for listening. The American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.

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