ANTH 540 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Town Crier, Umbilical Cord, Emotional Spectrum
22 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
How to Cry Well
Why did crying evolve?
oMachiavellian theory
oSignaling vulnerability to elicit care, kindness,
Function
oBenefits must outweigh cost
oIn line with theory that cognitive mechanisms have evolved to cope with expanding
social network
oPowerful & "cheap" tool for communication
Framework
Anti-social vs pro-social lens, and strength/deficit based for each: context of manipulation
oPro-social: mutual benefit for group/person, can be strength/deficit-based e.g. make
yourself cry at a wake for someone you didn’t know well to signal empathy and facilitate
closeness & make group feel altruistic leading to a cycle
oAnti-social: only benefits individual not group e.g. psychopath crying to elicit response
from group that only benefits him/ or crying so much in class people avoid you
Terminology
oIntraindividual/interindividual
oStrength/deficit based
oSocial crying
oAntisocial crying
Mainstream Psych Perspectives
Development
oInfants
Cholic
regulatory disorder
Excessive crying: higher levels of negative reactivity in both sexes, but only in
males correlated with decreased ability to self-regulate emotions
oAdults
Proneness correlated with crying attitude
Attitudes:
Makes you feel better (catharsis hypothesis)
Healthy
Hated crying
Can be controlled
Healthy/controllable correlated with attachment orientation
oElderly
oPsychotherapy patients
Therapeutic bond: effect on session by crying
Across ages
oChildren: Reactive crying
oKin selection theory in infants & adults: crying mediated by genes
oNeuroscience studies - Adult response to infant crying: evokes stronger response vs
adult (infant tears more salient to adults), uniquely activate somatosensory regions
oIdentical response for neutral vs sad face with tears: found effect of tears independent
of associated expression
Social cues/response
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Anthropological perspectives
Early literature dominated by cis middle to upper class white men: major critique of
anthropology
Reception committees publicly displayed grief upon receiving Spanish explorer
Aztecs: crying for negotiation
Japan: rooms rented for crying in correlated with rise in emotional inhibition - "crying clubs"
Marriage: differs across cultures
Mass weeping
oNorth Korea
oPrincess Diana
oJohn Lennon
oAyatollah Khomeini
Nancy schepher-hughes: death without weeping
oSelective neglect: may be evolutionarily advantageous to deny personhood during early
infanthood in populations where infant mortality is high
Veena Das
Individual effects of crying
Interindividual (btw-subject) vs intraindividual (personal/within-subject)
Most people report crying makes them feel better in either situation
o>70% of people across 37 countries
o>70% of clinicians recommend not surprising crying
Potential mechanisms
oCatharsis vs
oChemical catharsis: Some researchers believe some hormones contribute to sadness
and when you cry you excrete these
Catharsis
oAristotle: crying "cleanses the mind" through the release of emotions
oFreud: tears an "involuntary reflex"
oCornelius (1986): 94% of articles recommend crying to release psychological tension and
not to inhibit urge to cry
Later went back on this idea along with other researchers
But his methods were shit
International study on adult crying (ISAC, Becht & Vingerhoets, 2002-ongoing)
oBegan in 1996, based on self report
oItaly has highest incidence of male crying
oMalaysia has the lowest
oIsrael has the largest difference between genders
When is crying cathartic? (Bysma et al., 2008)
oMethods
Characteristics of most recent crying episode: antecedents, social context of
episode, crying and situation resolution
oResults: there is no single thing that determine whether crying is cathartic
Antecedent: if response to seeing another person crying, neg associated with
feeling better
Person to blame: don't feel better
Social aspects:
Resolution: if episode helps you resolve or accept some issue/change
perception, feel better
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
