"To weep is to make less the depth of grief." ~Shakespeare
Amazingly, science is beginning to confirm the accuracy of such statements. For the first time in history, researchers are verifying that crying is good for us because tears appear to reduce tensions, remove toxins, and increase the body's ability to heal itself. In short, scientists are drawing the conclusion that people who are able to cry may enjoy better physical and emotional health.
Tears are the liquid product of a process of crying to clean and lubricate the eyes. The word lacrimation (from L. Lacrima meaning Tear) (also spelled lachrymation) may also be used in a medical or literary sense to refer to crying. Strong emotions, such as sorrow or elation, may lead to crying. The process of yawning may also result in lacrimation. Although most land mammals have a lacrimation system to keep their eyes moist and in response to other stimuli, humans are the only mammal generally accepted to cry emotional tears.
The question of the function or origin of emotional tears remains open. Theories range from the simple, such as response to inflicted pain, to the more complex, including nonverbal communication in order to elicit "helping" behavior from others. Tears produced during emotional crying have a chemical composition which differs from other types of tear they contain significantly greater quantities of hormones prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormone, Leu-enkephalin and the elements potassium and manganese.
William H. Frey II, a biochemist, proposed that people feel "better" after crying, due to the elimination of hormones associated with stress, specifically adrenocorticotropic hormone. This, paired with increased mucosal secretion during crying, could lead to a theory that crying is a mechanism developed in humans to dispose of this stress hormone when levels grow too high.
Recent psychological theories of crying emphasize the relationship of crying to the experience of perceived helplessness. From this perspective, an underlying experience of helplessness can usually explain why people cry; for example, a person may cry after receiving surprisingly happy news, ostensibly because the person feels powerless or unable to influence what is happening.
It is a wonder, why do people cry? Surely tears must be good for us -- a way to calm the mind and cleanse the body. Yet studies show that crying sometimes makes people feel worse. Although many individuals report 'having a good cry', there are others for whom crying brings no sense of relief, release or resolution. They may cry for long periods of time with no appreciable change in the way they feel; they may even say they feel worse or 'washed out'. One might argue that if there is no change in their general situation, why should one expect them to feel better? Even though tears may not bring back a loved one from the grave or restore a collapsed love affair, some cognitive (Nicols & Zax 1977, Bohart 1980) and biological changes (Van Haeringen 1981, Frey et al 1981) may nevertheless occur during crying.
Gender and personality substantially and independently contribute to the variance in weeping frequency. Women cry more often and perceive weeping more as a coping style. Neuroticism proved to be considerably correlated with weeping frequency and weeping as a coping style, even after partialling out the effects of gender and age. Extraversion was correlated with relief and positive feelings after crying.
This is how one woman who has successfully overcome depression put it: "You need to acknowledge your tears and your sadness and see them as a valid reaction to things that are going on in your life .. I don't necessarily feel better in that the feelings that led me to cry have gone. I think it allows you to move on in some sense during the day you have a cry ... and I think that crying is probably really good for you because it means that you're forced to be in the moment and confront your feelings".
Ultimately, crying delivers more a satisfying tour of the world of tears than any didactic answers. The language of weeping is spoken worldwide, even if it is understood in myriad ways.
References:
Fears about tears? Why crying is good for you , Tears , Crying and tears , Crying: Is it Cathartic? , Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears , Gender and individual differences in adult crying
