Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by evoking social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were conducted almost exclusively on participants from North America and Europe, resulting in limited generalizability. This project examined the tears-social support intentions effect and possible mediating and moderating variables in a fully pre-registered study across 7,007 participants (24,886 ratings) and 41 countries spanning all populated continents. Participants were presented with four pictures out of 100 possible targets with or without digitally-added tears. We confirmed the main prediction that seeing a tearful individual elicits the intention to support, d = .49 [.43, .55]. Our data suggest that this effect could be mediated by perceiving the crying target as warmer and more helpless, feeling more connected, as well as feeling more empathic concern for the crier, but not by an increase in personal distress of the observer. The effect was moderated by the situational valence, identifying the target as part of one's group, and trait empathic concern. A neutral situation, high trait empathic concern, and low identification increased the effect. We observed high heterogeneity across countries that was, via split-half validation, best explained by countrylevel GDP per capita and subjective well-being with stronger effects for higher-scoring countries. These findings suggest that tears can function as social glue, providing one possible explanation why emotional crying persists into adulthood.

Background: The Adolescent Mental Health Continuum Short Form (MHC-SF) is a psychometrically valid tool to evaluate the domains of subjective well-being, but there is a lack of investigations which could distinguish subgroups with distinct subjective well-being profiles based on this measurement. Therefore, after testing the competing measurement models of the MHC-SF, our main aim was to identify subjective well-being profiles in a large adolescent sample. Methods: On a representative Hungarian adolescent sample (N = 1572; 51% girl; mean age was 15.39, SD = 2.26) confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) and exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) were used to test the factor stucture of the Adolescent MHC-SF. In addition, gender invariance of the best fitting model was also tested. Latent Profile Analyses (LPA) were conducted to reveal distinct subgroups and these profiles were then compared. Results: Results support the bifactor model of MHC-SF: the general and specific well-being factors which were invariant across gender. LPA yielded four subgroups, three of them have been theoretically hypothesized in previous works (i.e. flourishing, moderate mental health, languishing), but an emotionally vulnerable subgroup also emerged. Compared to the languishing group, this new subgroup demonstrated higher scores on prosocial behaviour, but had comparable level of loneliness and internalizing symptoms. Conclusions: Our results suggest that the MHC-SF is a reliable and valid instrument for assessing overall well-being and its components. In addition, the identification of young people to be at risk for low mental health may help us to tailor mental health promotion programs to their special needs.

Background and aimsChanges in the nomenclature of addictions suggest a significant shift in the conceptualization of addictions, where non-substance related behaviors can also be classified as addictions. A large amount of data provides empirical evidence that there are overlaps of different types of addictive behaviors in etiology, phenomenology, and in the underlying psychological and biological mechanisms. Our aim was to investigate the co-occurrences of a wide range of substance use and behavioral addictions.MethodsThe present epidemiological analysis was carried out as part of the Psychological and Genetic Factors of the Addictive Behaviors (PGA) Study, where data were collected from 3,003 adolescents and young adults (42.6% males; mean age 21 years). Addictions to psychoactive substances and behaviors were rigorously assessed.ResultsData is provided on lifetime occurrences of the assessed substance uses, their co-occurrences, the prevalence estimates of specific behavioral addictions, and co-occurrences of different substance use and potentially addictive behaviors. Associations were found between (i) smoking and problematic Internet use, exercising, eating disorders, and gambling (ii) alcohol consumption and problematic Internet use, problematic online gaming, gambling, and eating disorders, and (iii) cannabis use and problematic online gaming and gambling.ConclusionsThe results suggest a large overlap between the occurrence of these addictions and behaviors and underlies the importance of investigating the possible common psychological, genetic and neural pathways. These data further support concepts such as the Reward Deficiency Syndrome and the component model of addictions that propose a common phenomenological and etiological background of different addictive and related behaviors.