Emotional tears: What they are and how they work

Abstract

Tears serve ophthalmic functions: They lubricate, nourish, and protect the cornea. Tearers produce tears non-permanently and at relatively low cost. And observers pay attention to the eyes of others and extract from eyes and faces a lot of information about others’ stable and transient characteristics, including their mental states. These background conditions may have led to the evolution in the human lineage of additional signaling functions in tears. Emotional tearing occurs during negative events (e.g., injuries) and positive events (e.g., achievements). Episodes of tearing appear to be united by tearers’ subjective imputation of negative or positive value to certain internal or external events. Knowing the degree to which things enhance or diminish one’s prospects—the value of things—is a pressing matter for humans and other organisms. Value information is produced for internal consumption, to be used by behavior-regulating mechanisms in the focal individual. But some value information is made available, in addition, to other people, through tearing and other forms of verbal and non-verbal communication. Tearing may function as an implicit plea for receivers to minimize the costs imposed on the tearer by nature, by third-parties, or by the receivers themselves—common when the tearer has lower formidability or wherewithal than receivers do. In addition, tearing may exhort receivers to infer and register which things the tearer values, positively or negatively. Here, we characterize tears, describe the game-theoretic logic of bargaining from a position of weakness, outline the computational systems that regulate the production of and responses to emotional tears, and review findings about emotional tearing that are relevant to the signaling hypothesis.