Tears Evoke the Intention to Offer Social Support: A Systematic Investigation of the Interpersonal Effects of Emotional Crying Across 41 Countries

Abstract

Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. The persistence of this behavior throughout adulthood has fascinated and puzzled many researchers. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by triggering social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were typically conducted almost exclusively on participants from North America and Europe, resulting in limited generalizability. The present research 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. Each participant was presented with four pictures out of 100 possible targets with or without tears digitally added. We confirmed our main prediction, with an overall effect size of d = .49 [.43, .55] for the intention to support tearful individuals. This effect was 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. 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 a high amount of heterogeneity across countries that was, via split-half validation, best explained by country-level GDP per capita and subjective well-being with stronger effect sizes for countries scoring high on these measures.

PDSTD - The Portsmouth Dynamic Spontaneous Tears Database

“…While Darwin regarded emotional weeping merely as an incidental response fulfilling non-emotional 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). Tears may act as a social glue that heightens both the perceived helplessness of the weeper and feelings of connectedness from observers .…”

“…The riddle of tears (Vingerhoets & Bylsma, 2016), in particular the interplay between tears and facial expressions, has thus increasingly piqued the interest of researchers studying the social, cultural, and evolutionary role of emotional tears in human communication (Gračanin et al, 2018;Hasson, 2009;Sharman et al, 2020;Zickfeld et al, 2020). The present work aims to contribute to our understanding of tears as a socio-emotional signal by presenting the first validated and openly available database of spontaneously elicited tears and dynamic sadness expressions: the Portsmouth Dynamic Spontaneous Tears Database (PDSTD).…”