Unexplainable - Why do we cry?

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

Humans seem to be the only animals that cry from emotion. This Valentine’s Day, we’re wondering: What makes our tears so special? (Updated from 2022) For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to view show transcripts and read more about the topics on our show. Also, email us! [e-mail] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This episode is brought to you by Defender. With a towing capacity of 3,500 kilograms and a weighting depth of 900 millimeters, the Defender 110 pushes what's possible. Learn more at landrover.ca. Valentine's Day can bring up all sorts of emotions. Maybe this is the day your relationship finally gets to that next level. Or maybe you're a deeply cynical person who has no joy in your heart and you roll your eyes. Or maybe you just need a good cry.

That last option, that's what this week's episode is about. We're sharing one of our favorite episodes with you from our reporter, Manding Wyn, all about the science of crying. Here's Mandy. Benjamin Perry was in his first year at Union Theological Seminary when he heard a question that shook him. I had a professor who asked us to remember the last time that we we wept. We were talking about the Book of Lamentations, I think,

and you wanted to dig into just the experience of weeping. So the professor split the class into groups. And as people were growing around to share, I realized that I had not cried, let alone wept, in more than a decade. The last time I could really remember crying was like middle school. It was unexpected and kind of alienating. I was like, that's it. I could have, because everybody else is like sharing all these beautiful stories about,

oh my God, you know, my grandmother died and we had this moment and we cried together and I felt this really... And I'm sitting there with nothing. And it felt like this huge personal failing. Especially for someone who is thinking about becoming a minister. Which, you know, deserves emotional integrity. It seemed like something that was going to, you know, prevent me for being a good minister, but also prevent me from being a full human.

So he came up with a plan. I want to just relearn how to cry. So I started this weird experiment where I would make myself cry every day. He started as soon as he got back to his apartment. I remember being in my room and just saying, okay, well, this is it. Come hell or high water, I'm not leaving this room until I cry. Like, I haven't cried in over a decade, but like, that's fine. Like, you know, how hard can it be?

He started by reading parts of books he hoped would move him to tears. Nothing. He tried watching sad YouTube videos. You know, like those videos of like, oh, you know, a soldier's coming home from war, and, like, his dog hasn't seen him for four years and comes running across the lawn, like, all these things that are supposed to make you cry.

And it just wasn't doing it. I was like, oh, that's cute. Or, like, oh, you know, that's sad, but it was not nearly enough to actually make me cry. Then, after a few hours, he landed on something more personal. What I ended up thinking about was my parents dying. And so I just thought about, like, what would I say to them? If they were dying now, what would I say to them?

what would be left unsaid. And I really sat with that for like a while. Benjamin began to feel something swell up inside him. You know, is your throat starting to catch or your eyes starting to water up? And I just kept just hammering that, you know, imaginary trauma again and again and again. Until finally it just like burst

and I just started weeping. And I was, I wept so, so hard. I can't remember, you know, before or since crying that hard. Just this like years and years of repression just broke. And I was a mess. I just wept and wept and wept for, I don't know how long I felt like hours. I'm mandinguant, and this week on unexplainable, why do we cry? And is there something we're missing out on when we don't?

There are three types of tears. There are the tears your eyes are constantly shedding to keep your eyeballs lubricated. There are tears caused by irritants, like when you cut an onion. But the special tears, the mysterious ones, are the emotional tears. These are the tears that we cry when we're moved or overwhelmed, and scientists believe that these tears are uniquely human. I think that the study of crying is as important as the study of anger or the study of envy or whatever you have.

This is Ad Vingerhuts, one of the pioneers of crying research. I think that everything that contributes to a better understanding of who we as humans really are, and about human nature is important. Ad's been fixated on the question of why we cry emotional tears ever since he read Darwin's take, that emotional tears don't have a function. And that, for me as a researcher, that was quite a challenge. And from that moment on, I became very eager to study why people cry.

Ad suspected Darwin was wrong. So we set off to chip away at the mysteries of crying. One hypothesis he found came from a researcher named William H. Frey. He said that we should consider our tear glands as a kind of kidneys. And that actually when we produce tears and especially the biochemical content of tears, that that's a way to clean our blood. The big idea is that crying is a sort of detox, pushing stress hormone. out of our bodies. But ad says this idea is more speculative than proven.

That doesn't make sense. Then the production of saliva, so drooling also would make us help feel better. I don't think that anyone believes that that's the case. Another popular idea is that crying causes us to release endorphins or oxytocin in the brain. These are the hormones typically associated with love, connection, and good feelings. The idea here is that crying itself might trigger some internal cascade of hormones that make you feel better. But if that is true, if these substances are produced by crying, that would also have an impact on our pain perception. So Ad wanted to see if crying made people feel less pain. After having made people cry by exposing them to films, we measured their pain perception.

and contrary to expectations, we did not find any effect of crying on pain perception. But people often share that they feel better after crying. So Ad wondered, are we just taking this for granted? Does crying really make us feel better? We had a cross-cultural international study among more than 5,000 participants. And we asked them, try to remember the very details of the last time that you cried. Adan's team asked the participants about their mental state, and only half of them said

that they felt better after they cried. The other half either felt the same or even worse. If it's just 50% of the time that people experience benefits from crying, can we try to find out for whom and in which conditions people do benefit from their crying? It's hard to make strong conclusions because people might be misremembering, and there's also so many different reasons that a person might cry. But ads found that how people feel after they cry depends on what they're crying about. People were more likely to report feeling better after crying in situations where the result was still up for change, as opposed to situations where nothing could be done.

Like the passing away of a significant other, we cannot influence that situation, of course. versus situations which are in principle controllable. So we can influence the situation like, for example, a conflict situation. But crying isn't just an internal personal experience. Crying is important for us because it's an extremely effective way to elicit the support of others. Maybe not the crying is important, but it's maybe more how others respond to your tears that determine how you feel after a crying episode. Someone who's crying is much more likely to get emotional support from others

than someone who's just sad. We notice crying. So it's a very strong signal which help us to learn how the other feels. This recognition happens on a very deep level. So we have, in our brains, we have what we call mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are activated when we look at someone. and they mimic whatever behavior we see. That's why we can feel how other feel,

because to some extent, what's going on in the brain is nearly similar. And, well, it has been hypothesized that that's the basis of our empathic capacity. Obviously, people can still be jerks when they see someone cry, or they might think that someone is being manipulative. It all just depends on the situation and the people in the way. If they start laughing at you or become mad and you feel ashamed or embarrassed, then you will never experience any benefits from your tears. On the whole, emotional tears really seem to be about connecting us to others.

And this might be why we evolve these tears in the first place. We cry from the time we're babies, calling to our parents for care. But Ad thinks we do so with tears in our eyes, because tears have a unique advantage. You can focus them very specifically at a certain person from whom you expect that he or she might be willing to provide you the necessarily support. Human babies are vulnerable for a lot longer than other animals, and tearful crying might be a great way to get support without attracting predators. But even when we're adults, we still cry from emotion. We go from crying for our parents to crying for a whole bunch of other reasons. when we're regretful, when we look at art, when we're overwhelmed by gratitude.

Our emotional world and what can move us to the point of tears keeps expanding. But what becomes more important when we grow older, crying for empathic reasons. So we do not cry over our own suffering and misery, but especially also over the misery and suffering of others. This is what Benjamin, the minister who couldn't, cry, found in his own experiment of trying to make himself cry every day. I think in the beginning, I definitely was focusing on, like, pain and trauma. And I was really intentional about it. I was like, oh, haven't cried yet today.

Like, you don't get to go out to the bar until you cry. But as time went on, he found it easier and easier to cry, and not just from sadness. After a couple months, all of a sudden, you know, I would hear a beautiful piece of music, and I would be drawn to tears, and I would see something beautiful, and I would experience that depth of beauty in a way that I never did before. What started as just a link between, like, crying and pain really sort of blossomed into, like, crying as a very multifaceted response to all manner of, like, feeling in the world. Through crying, he felt fuller, more true to himself, and more able to be the minister he wanted to be. I have, you know, all kinds of relationships in

ministry, people who I have cried with, people who I have wept with. I've, you know, wept joyfully with friends as I've married them, I've cried with people as they've lost loved ones, like all of these rich textured human experiences that means so much to me. And I try to look back and think about them dry-eyed, and it's terrible. Benjamin's experiment with crying

made him feel more connected to himself and others, but the scientific understanding of emotional tears still has a lot of gaps. What we know comes from a handful of lab studies or surveys. There have been almost no neural studies analyzing what happens in the brain when we cry, almost no long-term studies that trace how crying impacts us over time, or even experimental studies done on people crying in their everyday lives outside a controlled lab setting. There's still a lot to learn here. But even if we don't know exactly when or why or how,

crying seems like a fundamental part of who we are. So what does it say about us if we don't cry? What are we missing? That's after the break. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level. With a private wing to check in and your own security channel at London Heathrow,

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We're all talking to each other to see. What did we do wrong? What did we not see? I'm in Washington, D.C. this week to interview Ruben Gallego. He's a Democratic senator from Arizona, and he's been thinking openly about running for higher office. But he's recently run into some hobbalt. Because of his connection to Congressman Eric's Waigo. I have to learn from this, and I will learn from this.

But for me, it's not a 2028 question. It's about what it means to be a better first boss in my office and also a better senator to my constituents. This week on America, actually, we asked Gallego about predatory behavior in Washington, his plans for immigration reform and more. Crying is undeniably powerful, how it can seize up our bodies or create a deep visceral response in others. But there's tons of people who aren't really criers. Ad Vingerhutz, the crying researcher, he used to get calls from people who were worried that they didn't cry enough, or at the right times.

Several years ago, I was called by a woman, and she said, Professor Vingerhutz, I have not cried for over 22 years. Is that problematic? This is a question lots of people have, and ads actually done some research on it. We did another study in which we compared the well-being of people who had not cried for 15 years with a well-being of normal cryers. Normal in the study meant about zero to four times a month.

The results showed that there was no difference in well-being between these two groups. They did not differ. So, Ad didn't have a perfect answer for the woman who called him. I said, I don't know, I better ask you, what do you think? And she said, well, for me, it's no problem. I feel happy and so on. But she did notice that her lack of crying seemed to be a problem for other people. She said, just in those situations, when in our family there is something serious that's happened and everybody is sad.

And I do not express any emotions. and I do not cry, then they consider me as a cool person, and they don't like me because I do not express the right emotion at that moment in the right way. And she said that I find very sad. And that's exactly what Ad found in his research. It's almost like not crying might be more of a problem for other people and our relationships to them. What we saw was that normal cryers, They were more empathic, more connected with others, and they received more social support. How often and when people cry is influenced by a lot of factors in ways that are hard to parse.

It seems like it's up to us to decide if we cry too much or too little, depending on how crying impacts our lives and relationships. But on its own, not crying isn't necessarily a problem. I don't think that there's an issue that you need to worry about. unless your lack of tears has to do with the history of suppressing emotions. Ad says that might not be so good for you. So you do not just express your tears, but also suppress your anger and your jealousy. And maybe even, for example, that you suppress your feelings about sexuality and so on.

So that's a complex of, well, living with your break on. You do not express a lift to the fullest. And this is what Benjamin, the minister, was struggling with when he realized that he hadn't cried in over a decade, because he used to be pretty different. So I was definitely a kid, like a younger boy who cried a lot.

He watched other boys get bullied for crying as he grew up. And then when he hit middle school, he had another thing to worry about. I started realizing like, oh, I'm also attracted to. boys, that became something that I had a lot of internalized shame about something that I was very worried about other people finding out about. And one of the things about crying in particular, as vis-à-vis masculinity, is that it's very much associated with queer men. You know, you're

effeminized. It's a womanly thing to do to cry. And so if you're, you know, a man and you're crying, that means that you're probably gay because, you know, that's how that goes. So it felt safer to stop crying. So really started to sort of sprint in the opposite direction and think about, you know, how can I be, you know, more stereotypically masculine? How can I really repress and downplay what, you know, would let the world and also myself confront this truth that I was absolutely not ready to face. But when he started to cry again, it changed him. It was like the breaking of those neat borders that I had erected around my emotional life because it kept, you know, made sure that I wasn't going to venture into. to a place that would bring me to tears. I had just grown so used to skimming over the surface

of what I experienced that to actually, you know, really fully experienced life again was like coming alive. Benjamin stopped the experiment after almost half a year when he found that he didn't need to force himself to cry anymore. And it's opened so many doors to just be a full person. I have beautiful queer community that I love so deeply and I cry with regularly. I think that crying allowed me to recover who I was when I was a child. And I think it's offered this opportunity for me to create real relationships with people in a way that I simply don't think would have been possible if I continued deadening myself to the world.

He knew that when he started this experiment, he would be wading into uncharted emotional waters. But he was also surprised by something else. It's a transformation that crying can elicit in the world where all of a sudden you start weeping, and that space is no longer the same. Thinking about a worship service we had a few months ago

where one of our choir members during the sermon became very, very overwhelmed emotionally and started crying and weeping and the whole service stopped because she was weeping, weeping, weeping, and needed to sing a solo or something and so we literally couldn't move forward

because of this. And also it provided this opportunity where we just stopped and the people around her held her and the people who were gathered there all had a moment to just stop and say, you know what? Everybody all around us is carrying so many things that we don't see. The very thing that makes tears so disruptive, the loudness, the messiness, the discomfort of it all,

it's the very thing that gives tears their power. If you're in a circumstance where something is deeply wrong and everybody is being quiet and all of a sudden somebody starts to wail, it gives other people permission to name that thing that they may have been feeling inside themselves, but didn't have the courage or couldn't fully put their finger on what was wrong. When we cry or when we see someone else cry, we're offered a choice.

Do we continue to obey the social norms of the location, or do we honor the fullness of the person's humanity who's experiencing this thing? And I think that those kinds of questions of, you know, of disrupting peace to honor the suffering that someone's experiencing. It invites us to

do something different. This episode was reported and produced by me, Manning Wynne. There was editing from Brian Resnick, Catherine Wells, Meredith Hodnott, and Noam Hassanfeld. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music from Noam,

fact-checking from Zoe Mullick, and Neil Danehia is going to the moon in his heart. If you want to hear more from Benjamin and what he's learned about crying, he has a book coming out called Cry Baby, Why Are Tears Matter. And there's a comma after the cry, like, cry baby. Anyway, special thanks to Lauren Basma for her help on this week's episode. And if you have any thoughts about this episode or ideas for the show, please email us.

We're at UnexPlanable at Vox.com. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.