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Comment by jawon | Hacker News Reader

Tears aren't excretory or cathartic? Maybe this guy hasn't been through the right kind of situation.

When one of my kids was going through a health crisis I did a heck of a lot of lone crying. Each time internal stress and anxiety would build, my guts would get all churned up, then it would reach the point where I would cry and the "symptoms" would all reduce dramatically before starting to build up again.

I was amazed at the time that crying had such a noticeable effect on physical symptoms. I thought I must be dumping something, adrenalin?, out my tear ducts.

I'm probably wrong, though it's not the kind of set up you can test in a lab.

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I don't think his point is that it isn't cathartic; he's pointing out that there is no physiological reason for crying in particular to have evolved to be cathartic. What have leaking eyes or a quavering respiratory system got to do with relieving overwhelming emotions? Nothing. And no other animals experience this.

It's a confusion of cause and effect (or post-hoc fallacy). "I cry because it makes me feel better" supposes that feeling better is the purpose of crying. But really it's the other way around: Crying is the purpose of feeling better. Crying is the thing with purpose, because it's an important and useful social signal. Overpowering urges to succumb to it, and feeling better after having done so, are evolution's way of coaxing our minds to do something that's useful to us, just like urges to eat or have sex, and feeling better after having done them.

Why do we smile when we're happy? Is it because we're happy (we also expose a similar face when we're scared), or is smiling the purpose of feeling happy?

Not sure if you're arguing for or against my point, but I'd say the purpose of feeling happy is to reinforce the behavior that got you where you are. Smiling (and the compulsion to smile, which few other animals have, though they do feel pleasure) is to signal your state of mind to your peers.

I wouldn't say (and wasn't saying) that the purpose of feeling sad is to cry or engender social signaling (parallel to happiness, the purpose of sadness is downregulation of behavior), but the compulsion to cry itself and the relief afterwards is about signaling.

It's not really a confusion of cause and effect. It's that most probably there's a cause-and-effect somewhere we don't know. America the landmass did exist before we got to know that it did.

It's quite suggestive that most of the nervous situations can lead up to physiological phaenomena like crying, laughing or stomach pain.

From: http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/emotio...

"The phrase "having a good cry" suggests that crying can actually make you feel physically and emotionally better, which many people believe. Some scientists agree with this theory, asserting that chemicals build up in the body during times of elevated stress. These researchers believe that emotional crying is the body's way of ridding itself of these toxins and waste products.

In fact, one study collected both reflex tears and emotional tears (after peeling an onion and watching a sad movie, respectively). When scientists analyzed the content of the tears, they found each type was very different. Reflex tears are generally found to be about 98 percent water, whereas several chemicals are commonly present in emotional tears [Source: The Daily Journal. First is a protein called prolactin, which is also known to control breast milk production. Adrenocorticotropic hormones are also common and indicate high stress levels. The other chemical found in emotional tears is leucine-enkephalin, an endorphin that reduces pain and works to improve mood. Of course, many scientists point out that research in this area is very limited and should be further studied before any conclusion can be made."

Crying can, quite literally, act like a stress valve!

I want to agree with what you say but "ridding toxins" etc is classic bullshit. You may be releasing some helpful or at least stimulating chemicals in response. You may be activating different neuropathways, epigenetics, etc, even, to play down the buzzword path.

    > but "ridding toxins" etc is classic
    > bullshit

That's exceptionally context dependant, and in this one:

    > First is a protein called prolactin
    > Adrenocorticotropic hormones are also common
    > leucine-enkephalin

You've made the wrong call. I'm all about detoxes being pseudoscience, but you have more than one organ in your body dedicated to ridding it of toxins.

Maybe those hormones are in emotional tears because that's what's in the blood at the time, same as breast milk containing alcohol if you've imbibed recently.

In other words, tears reflect the body's hormones rather than influencing them.

I never cried tears of happiness when the primary sex hormone in my system was testosterone. Now that estrogen is, I cry all the time. Not just from hormones, but also from how happy I am not not be living a lie anymore. And sometimes for absolutely no reason whatsoever. And it's emotionally cathartic as fuck.

This entire thing is so anecdotal and from-personal-experience, it's not remotely interesting in its attempts to generalize.

That's interesting. I've got a colleague who made the same change, and she claims also that crying "as a man" is rare and very hard – as if that pathway is somehow blocked – while it comes very easily "as a woman" when taking hormones and generally helps to relieve bad emotions (or fortify good ones?). If she stops taking hormones for a while, she can't cry anymore.

As a "manly man", I imagine a cathartic cry would help to get rid of deep frustration, stress and anger, but I couldn't cry even if my life depended on it. I'm not an expert, but I feel it's more about nature than nurture – I guess males historically were coping better exhibiting an aggressive "fight" response. It of course leaves men hanging out to dry in situations where an active fight response doesn't help at all, attacking isn't possible and you have to deal with being helpless or hopeless... Cue to male (murder/)suicide.

> but I couldn't cry even if my life depended on it. I'm not an expert, but I feel it's more about nature than nurture

I couldn't either, but after seeing a therapist for some time (for a light depression), I became much more aware of my emotions. Crying became much more easy as well.

Could be a cultural thing this difference in crying between the sexes.

I suspect it is. Look at Chagnon's Yanomamo ethnographies, or at the Homeric epics. Or the Old Testament, or Beowulf, or Le Morte D’Arthur. Men cry at the drop of a hat in all of those.

True -but is present there as a thing for men to aspire to, or recorded as a historical fact?

Seems to me like dumping a chemical out of your tear ducts is exactly the type of thing you can test.

Reminds me of all the historic (and continuing!) confusion around women's sexual health.

How so?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria

I mean what is the link to tears, just "confusion"?

Also, Victorian attitudes to female hysteria are confounded by JC attitudes towards female sexuality.

Ah, ok - I read the "how so" in the context of GGP post:

"Reminds me of all the historic (and continuing!) confusion around women's sexual health"

I don't think the difficulty in testing that hypothesis is whether your samples have some chemicals in them or not. It's finding a sample population, and the collection of their samples.

That is, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of profoundly rude to approach someone in the midst of terrible grief, all, "I see you're weeping over your loss. Let me have some of your tears for science!"

You could "pre-enroll" people — say, the families of terminally ill patients — to collect their own tears when they do suffer that loss, and weep for it. Even then, though, compliance is going to be difficult to manage. Their priority in that moment isn't your experiment; it's their own devastation. And absolutely rightly so.

Having to stop, or even momentarily diminish, their weeping to fetch the sample kit — do they even have it with them? do they remember where it is? — then open it up (because it has to be sterile, right?) and jab it in their face might also have a materially deleterious effect on the grief-processing role that their weeping in that moment is supposed to provide. If so, that might also taint the results of the experiment, no?

So, no, it's not just a matter of testing for the presence of some chemicals.

(Edited for clarity and phrasing.)

Or you could just find people who are prone to cry at sad films (since I've had kids - me).

Sure. I cry at movies and shows pretty often, too. (The finale of "Six Feet Under"? OMFG.) But that presumes those tears aren't somehow subtly different from personal grief tears.

I really doubt they are, but if we're going to ask the question, it behooves us to get the most accurate answer possible.

I don't think you are wrong. I've had the experiences of deep grief before. Crying and tears can be cathartic; they can also result from feeling something profoundly moving, usually resting on a deep undertone of sadness.

It also sucks when you have a lot of sadness and grief bottled up -- yet for whatever reason, you can't cry.

I will also note: judgement is a subtle form of disgust.

Dr. Eckman has a great Atlas of Emotions: http://atlasofemotions.org/ which is a great starting point for differentiating between the culturally-universal emotions and the myriad of emotional states.

From my personal experience though, the best way to study and make sense of emotions is to experience them. Intellectualizing emotions without experiencing them is not sufficient.

Any number of mechanisms could serve this purpose, though: urination, sweating, blowing your nose. Why should these chemicals leave our eyes? I believe that is what the author is trying to answer.

Many features of human physiology serve more than one function -- our eyebrow ridges protect our eyes from sun, dust, getting punched. I don't mean to reject your idea; but it doesn't seem to go very far towards explaining why tears are the way they are.

Do you have any reason to believe the same chemicals are exclusively in tears (vs feces, urine, sweat, saliva, etc)? Also, it should be easy to do an order-of-magnitude estimate of the effect, even if a chemical is exclusively in tears (concentration * volume). It's highly implausible tears contain anywhere near enough of a particular hormone to affect concentrations across a volume as large as a human body, and deserves some scrutiny/evidence.

I had the same reaction when reading that, but I think the author was mainly trying to make the point that there is no reason a priori to attribute direct psychological properties to lacrimal secretions.

There's a while lot more to crying than just the tears.

It's a key piece to his thesis, and it's tripe. It's like saying exercise can't make you feel better because sweat glands don't excrete excess norepinephrine .

I don't think you understood his argument at all.

What didn't I understand? He insists there has to be a reason why we cry (as understood by tearful weeping) and spends the rest of the article trying to ascribe a social purpose to it. His rejection that crying is therapeutic is a cornerstone to that, and it ignores a whole range of alternate lines of inquiry.

Exercise has a host of indirect (endorphin production), secondary (improved circulation), and tertiary (self-image) effects that improve mood. I think his failure to imagine other reasons for crying are just as limiting as trying to deny those effects of exercise because sweat doesn't contain mood improving hormones or excrete mood worsening ones.

1) He didn't deny that crying is therapeutic in the emotional sense (in that you feel good afterwards); only that the expulsion of tears or the quavering of breath serves no regulatory function physiologically. Just because it feels good after those things happen doesn't mean they caused it.

2) His point is that the urges to cry and feeling good afterwards are evolved instincts to coax you to do something socially useful, i.e. to signal to your kin that you're in distress. The tears and sobbing are the signal; an effect of your emotional state, not the cause of it. The tears are intended to act on your peers, not your physiology. When they've done their job, you're relieved.

In other words, the "symptoms" of crying are probably arbitrary and could have been any number of things that accomplish the goal of signalling, because there is no reasonable physiological connection to the display and the change in emotional state.

3) Exercise is not a good analogy because it has a direct physiological effect on your system. It is exercise which strengthens your muscles and cardiovascular system, not any other activity. Thus it makes sense that we feel internally rewarded for having exercised, because the activity is directly needed in some sense to maintain homeostasis. Compare this to his hypothesis about crying, which is that if its purpose is truly to be a signal, it would have made just as much sense for us to evolve to, say, shiver, or urinate, or faint, or vomit, or convulse, or do any other highly recognizable behavior involuntarily to indicate distress to our peers.

1) Why don't you think it's physiologically therapeutic, too? As I note in another comment, we have to correct drug studies for the placebo effect because we actually get better if we believe we're going to. Breathing changes can modify mood. Maybe this is incorrect, but I'm certainly not going to accept it serves no physiological function without any sort of proof.

2. I believe you are misunderstanding his point, which is, "inherently they're just a piece of social technology, a device for coordinating the tradeoff between dominance and social support."

2b) You undermine your point #1 by pointing out that the "symptoms" are arbitrary. Out of the thousands of possible responses, why tears + weeping? There are more effective signals, and other social animals acknowledge dominance & submission differently. That would suggest crying has a reason beyond social signaling.

3) I don't think exercise is a poor analogy here, but let me be direct: crying could have a direct or secondary neurological effect on mental state that doesn't have an analog in other animals.

That also seems like the stress & anxiety could be causing the other symptoms: crying alleviates stress, which would then ease the symptoms.

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