How Weeping Influences the Perception of Facial Expressions: The Signal Value of Tears

Gračanin, Asmir; Krahmer, Emiel; Balsters, Martijn; Küster, Dennis; Vingerhoets, A.J.J.M.

doi:10.1007/s10919-020-00347-x

Cited by 14 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…All in all, we found that perceived appropriateness seems to influence the perception of crying targets as more helpless or warmer and feeling more connected to them, but not so much support intentions directly. Finally, the mediation effect by perceived appropriateness was smallest on perceiving the crier as helpless, which seems to strengthen the idea that signaling helplessness is one of the most potent mechanisms explaining the intention to support effect that can sometimes operate regardless of context (Gračanin et al, 2021).…”

Section: The Role Of Appropriateness Of Tearssupporting

confidence: 63%

“…Another possible interpretation is that observing someone shedding tears in a seemingly neutral situation (such as doing the laundry) results in attributing or assuming that something distressing must have happened to that person. In fact, there is some evidence that tears signal high emotional intensity (Gračanin et al, 2021), and, in the current study, ratings of helplessness were similarly high for targets shedding tears in a neutral situation compared to targets crying for a negative reason. It seems that if the reason for crying is unknown, individuals typically assume a negative or distressing reason for the tears, which is supported by previous studies manipulating tears without presenting specific contextual cues (e.g., Van de Ven et al, 2017;Bobowik et al, 2020).…”

Section: The Role Of Appropriateness Of Tearssupporting

confidence: 40%

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Tears evoke the intention to offer social support: A systematic investigation of the interpersonal effects of emotional crying across 41 countries

Zickfeld

Ven

Pich

et al. 2021

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

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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.

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Section: The Role Of Appropriateness Of Tearssupporting

confidence: 63%

Section: The Role Of Appropriateness Of Tearssupporting

confidence: 40%

Tears evoke the intention to offer social support: A systematic investigation of the interpersonal effects of emotional crying across 41 countries

Zickfeld

Ven

Pich

et al. 2021

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

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“…If early signs of weeping -prior to the actual presence of tearsare conveyed in the pre-sadness phase, observer ratings should be more negative compared to those of the neutral (control) baseline. In accordance with empirical work on the tear effect using static images, we further predicted a substantial increase in perceived negativity (i.e., negative valence, arousal, sadness, (Gračanin et al, 2021;Ito et al, 2019;Reed et al, 2015) of weepers (vs. non-weepers) during the sadness phase. This should be reflected in a significant interaction between weeping and time phase, such that weepers are perceived as most negative after they started crying.…”

Section: Aims Of the Present Researchsupporting

confidence: 87%

“…This points towards the unique value of tears in the context of facial expressions (Ito et al, 2019;Reed et al, 2015). In accordance with the sadness enhancing hypothesis by Gračanin et al (2021), the signaling function of tears might thus be specifically tied to the perception of sadness. Future research might be aimed at exploring the distinct behavioral cues that impact observer responses.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 67%

“…While Darwin regarded emotional weeping merely as an incidental response fulfilling nonemotional functions such as the lubrication and protection of the eyes (Darwin, 1872;Vingerhoets, 2013), there is little doubt today that emotional tears serve important social signalling functions (Gračanin et al, 2021). Through the act of crying, we intuitively reach out to others, thereby eliciting prosocial responses from onlookers (Hendriks et al, 2008;Zickfeld et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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PDSTD - The Portsmouth Dynamic Spontaneous Tears Database

Küster¹,

Baker²,

Krumhuber³

2021

Preprint

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The vast majority of research on human emotional tears has relied on posed and static stimulus materials. In this paper, we introduce the Portsmouth Dynamic Spontaneous Tears Database (PDSTD), a free resource comprising video recordings of 24 female encoders depicting a balanced representation of sadness stimuli with and without tears. Encoders watched a neutral film and a self-selected sad film and reported their emotional experience for 9 emotions. Extending this initial validation, we obtained norming data from an independent sample of naïve observers (N = 91, 45 females) who watched videos of the encoders during three time phases (neutral, pre-sadness, sadness), yielding a total of 72 validated recordings. Observers rated the expressions during each phase on 7 discrete emotions, negative and positive valence, arousal, and genuineness. All data were analyzed by means of general linear mixed modelling (GLMM) to account for sources of random variance. Our results confirm the successful elicitation of sadness, and demonstrate the presence of a tear effect, i.e., a substantial increase in perceived sadness for spontaneous dynamic weeping. To our knowledge, the PDSTD is the first database of spontaneously elicited dynamic tears and sadness that is openly available to researchers. The stimuli can be accessed free of charge via OSF from https://osf.io/uyjeg/?view_only=24474ec8d75949ccb9a8243651db0abf.

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People Attribute a Range of Highly-Varied and Socially-Bound Meanings to Naturalistic Sad Facial Expressions

de la Harpe,

Palermo,

Brown

et al. 2024

J Nonverbal Behav

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Depictions of sadness are commonplace, and here we aimed to discover and catalogue the complex and nuanced ways that people interpret sad facial expressions. We used a rigorous qualitative methodology to build a thematic framework from 3,243 open-ended responses from 41 people who participated in 2020 and described what they thought sad expressors in 80 images were thinking, feeling, and/or intending to do. Face images were sourced from a novel set of naturalistic expressions (ANU Real Facial Expression Database), as well as a traditional posed expression database (Radboud Faces Database). The resultant framework revealed clear themes around the expressors’ thoughts (e.g., acceptance, contemplation, disbelief), social needs (e.g., social support or withdrawal), social behaviours/intentions (e.g., mock or manipulate), and the precipitating events (e.g., social or romantic conflict). Expressions that were perceived as genuine were more frequently described as thinking deeply, reflecting, or feeling regretful, whereas those perceived as posed were more frequently described as exaggerated, overamplified, or dramatised. Overall, findings highlight that facial expressions — even with high levels of consensus about the emotion category they belong to — are interpreted in nuanced and complex ways that emphasise their role as other-oriented social tools, and convey semantically related emotion categories that share smooth gradients with one another. Our novel thematic framework also provides an important foundation for future work aimed at understanding variation in the social functions of sadness, including exploring potential differences in interpretations across cultural settings.

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How Weeping Influences the Perception of Facial Expressions: The Signal Value of Tears

Cited by 14 publications

References 34 publications

Tears evoke the intention to offer social support: A systematic investigation of the interpersonal effects of emotional crying across 41 countries

Tears evoke the intention to offer social support: A systematic investigation of the interpersonal effects of emotional crying across 41 countries

PDSTD - The Portsmouth Dynamic Spontaneous Tears Database

People Attribute a Range of Highly-Varied and Socially-Bound Meanings to Naturalistic Sad Facial Expressions

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