This is where Darwin was wrong and his assumption takes us to the heart of William Frey’s research. As well as devising methods of inducing sadness to make people cry, Frey experimented with substances which would irritate the eye sufficiently to produce tears. Ammonia and tear gas were ruled out for ethical reasons. Instead he gave his volunteers various other substances to inhale including fresh horseradish, but in the end it was the old cliché – onions – which really made them weep. Even in Shakespeare’s time these were the old crying standby. In The Taming of the Shrew a boy who is acting the part of the woman is advised,
And if the boy not have a woman’s gift,
To rain a shower of commanded tears, An onion will do well for such a shift.
As well as watching over-sentimentalised films, Professor Frey’s brave volunteers had to put their faces over a blender full of freshly chopped onions and inhale deeply with their eyes open for about three minutes. The moment an onion is cut a substance called thiopropanal-S-oxide is released into the air. When it reaches the tear film on the eye there’s a chemical reaction which produces sulphuric acid, so not surprisingly it stings. The only way to stop the reaction is to cover up the eyeball or to stop the substance escaping into the air in the first place. Hence the two successful methods for avoiding streaming eyes are washing the chemical away by peeling onions under water or wearing contact lenses to prevent the vapour reaching the surface of the eye.
When Frey came to analyse the two types of tears he found that tears are not all the same; the emotional tears contained 24% more protein than the irritant tears. The purpose of these proteins in the tears is to fight infection and to control the levels of acidity on the eyeball. This suggests that something special is happening when we shed emotional tears – an expulsion of chemicals perhaps. For this to have any emotional benefit these substances would need to have an association with stress, but as far as we know there isn’t a clear link between stress and these proteins. However, when Frey dissected whole tear glands he did discover the presence of two hormones known to be related to stress – ACTH and leucine-enkephalin. The former is also found in tears themselves. He believes that when we cry we expel toxic substances which are byproducts of the stress we’re experiencing. The idea is that you flush them out through your eyes with the result that you feel slightly better. Indeed he did find that 85% of females and 73% of men reported feeling better after a good cry. Even the existence of the phrase ‘a good cry’ suggests that it’s seen as useful. I saw a TV advert recently for a CD of ‘All-Time Classic Tearjerkers – the most moving tunes for times of reflection’. The very title accepts that sometimes people want to cry and these sad tunes might help them along.
However, attempts to demonstrate the beneficial effects of crying in a laboratory haven’t quite worked. It ought to be simple. Ask people to rate their emotional state, show them a sad film, wait for them to finish crying and then ask them to rate their emotional state again to see whether there’s been an improvement. Unfortunately there’s usually no difference, suggesting that it’s not the expulsion of toxins through tears that makes you feel better. Perhaps you only feel better if those tears encourage someone else to comfort you. There is a big problem, however, with extrapolation from such an artificial situation to real life. When you cry during a sad film you are simply empathising with the characters and imagining yourself in that situation, which is rather different from feeling so helpless in your own life that you cry. Moreover, the situation is inevitably going to affect the way you feel after crying. At home a good cry might lead to a sense of relief, but at work or in a laboratory you might end up feeling awkward or embarrassed.
There is another possibility for the discrepancy between people’s own reports of feeling better after crying and the laboratory experiments. The mind doesn’t assign equal importance to the creation and storage of memories of different events. We all have biases that affect what we remember. It helps us to justify our crying behaviour if we only recall the times it made us feel better.
the message of tears
Randy Cornelius sat in a studio at his local radio station WSPK in Poughkeepsie, USA – the radio station promising to play ‘today’s best music’. He’s a psychology professor at Vassar College and was waiting to be connected to the gloomy cupboard of a studio where I was sitting at the BBC in London, waiting to interview him for a radio series. It took a while and I could hear various engineers from both the British and American ends come over the headphones. Then, another voice with an American accent, ‘Hello, hello, can anybody hear me?’ I wasn’t sure whether I’d reached the man himself or another engineer. ‘Are you Randy?’ I asked. ‘I sure am,’ he said, causing mirth at the British end, but not a flicker from the States, where it doesn’t have quite the same meaning. Once it was established that the link between the studios was working, we went on to have a serious discussion about crying.
In contrast to Professor Frey, he believes that tears are all about communication; they let other people know that you’re upset, information which might ultimately benefit you. Crying could be a powerful way of telling another person that their ‘harmless’ teasing has in fact touched a nerve and that they should stop. It also signals to those around you that you need their sympathy or help.
After Julia and her fiancé split up she was walking along the street sobbing uncontrollably when a stranger approached her offering help. Because she was crying so much she couldn’t answer and shook her head. Tears provide such a strong message that they can even elicit help from strangers. Cornelius believes the failure of the laboratory studies to demonstrate benefits from crying is due to the fact that during the experiments nobody receives any comfort from another, so they haven’t gained any help by crying and therefore don’t feel any happier afterwards.
Think of the kinds of situation where you tend to cry. When Randy Cornelius asked people to do this the occasions most often cited were the death of a friend, the end of a relationship, watching a sad film or poignantly happy events like a wedding. Now think back to the last time you actually did cry. Here it was a slightly different story. Tears tended to follow arguments or rejection or feelings of loneliness or inadequacy. Cornelius believes helplessness might be the key reason we cry; we feel we can’t do anything to change the situation, so we cry. Or to put it another way, we can’t do anything more for ourselves, so we need other people’s help and it’s crying which signals the seriousness of our situation. Babies cry in order to get the attention and help they need. Perhaps adults are doing the same.
the quintet of the astonished
In the second exhibition room at the National Gallery in London there are three cool cream benches, lined up one behind the other. We sit and watch in silence, apart from the inevitable occasional cough. On the wall in front of us there’s a life-size photograph of five people standing in two rows – a man and a woman at the front, and three men behind them. Although they are close together they don’t look at each other. Three of the people are staring at the same place in the middle distance. The woman has her arms crossed in front of her chest, one hand on top of the other. Slowly her left fist clenches tightly. This isn’t a photograph after all. The people are moving, very slowly. The woman looks angry, yet despairing. Who is she gazing at? She opens her mouth and her shoulders rise. She is trying to control her emotions but still looks tortured with distress. What terrible thing could she be watching? Has she just seen the man who killed