The gender-specific impact of emotional tears

Stadel, Marie; Daniels, Judith K.; Warrens, Matthijs J.; Jeronimus, Bertus F.

doi:10.1007/s11031-019-09771-z

Cited by 22 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Contrary to our predictions, the social support effect was not moderated by the targets' gender, nor by a combination of the observers' and targets' gender as found in previous studies (Stadel et al, 2019). In general, intention to support ratings by female participants and for female targets were stronger, but these factors did not moderate the effect of visible tears.…”

Section: When Do Tears Trigger the Intention To Support?contrasting

confidence: 99%

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

Zickfeld¹,

Ven²,

Pich³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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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.

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Section: When Do Tears Trigger the Intention To Support?contrasting

confidence: 99%

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

Zickfeld¹,

Ven²,

Pich³

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…emotional contagion) 10 and authenticity 1 . Crying, for example, is an intense emotional expression of a negative state often accompanied by lacrimation, which, in a social context, is assumed to have the purpose of eliciting help from listeners 11 , or, in an interpersonal context, is understood to function as relief and improve mood after shed tears 12 . Conversely, and vastly more studied in nonverbal vocalization literature, laughter is an emotional expression of a positive state and has the role of promoting and maintaining social bonding 13 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pupil dilation reflects the authenticity of received nonverbal vocalizations

Cosme

Rosa

Lima

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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The ability to infer the authenticity of other’s emotional expressions is a social cognitive process taking place in all human interactions. Although the neurocognitive correlates of authenticity recognition have been probed, its potential recruitment of the peripheral autonomic nervous system is not known. In this work, we asked participants to rate the authenticity of authentic and acted laughs and cries, while simultaneously recording their pupil size, taken as proxy of cognitive effort and arousal. We report, for the first time, that acted laughs elicited higher pupil dilation than authentic ones and, reversely, authentic cries elicited higher pupil dilation than acted ones. We tentatively suggest the lack of authenticity in others’ laughs elicits increased pupil dilation through demanding higher cognitive effort; and that, reversely, authenticity in cries increases pupil dilation, through eliciting higher emotional arousal. We also show authentic vocalizations and laughs (i.e. main effects of authenticity and emotion) to be perceived as more authentic, arousing and contagious than acted vocalizations and cries, respectively. In conclusion, we show new evidence that the recognition of emotional authenticity can be manifested at the level of the autonomic nervous system in humans. Notwithstanding, given its novelty, further independent research is warranted to ascertain its psychological meaning.

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“…We used a set of four photographs of neutral faces of adult persons – two women and two men – kindly provided by the photographer Marco Anelli. These photographs had been used in previous studies ( van de Ven et al, 2016 ; Vingerhoets et al, 2016 ; Zickfeld et al, 2018 ; Stadel et al, 2019 ; Picó et al, 2020 ). The photographs were taken in the precise moment when the subject was engaged in calm crying – the particular distinction of which is the presence of visible tears with little marked emotional expression – in a spontaneous way (see details of the photographs in Picó et al, 2020 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Our Gaze Reacts to Another Person’s Tears? Experimental Insights Into Eye Tracking Technology

2020

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Crying is an ubiquitous human behavior through which an emotion is expressed on the face together with visible tears and constitutes a slippery riddle for researchers. To provide an answer to the question “How our gaze reacts to another person’s tears?,” we made use of eye tracking technology to study a series of visual stimuli. By presenting an illustrative example through an experimental setting specifically designed to study the “tearing effect,” the present work aims to offer methodological insight on how to use eye-tracking technology to study non-verbal cues. A sample of 30 healthy young women with normal visual acuity performed a within-subjects task in which they evaluated images of real faces with and without tears while their eye movements were tracked. Tears were found to be a magnet for visual attention in the task of facial attribution, facilitating a greater perception of emotional intensity. Moreover, the inspection pattern changed qualitatively and quantitatively, with our participants becoming fully focused on the tears when they were visible. The mere presence of a single tear running down a cheek was associated with an increased emotional inference and greater perception of sincerity. Using normalized and validated tools (Reading the Eyes in the Mind Test and the SALAMANCA screening test for personality disorders), we measured the influence of certain characteristics of the participants on their performance of the experimental task. On the one hand, a higher level of cognitive empathy helped to classify tearful faces with higher emotional intensity and tearless faces with less emotional intensity. On the other hand, we observed that less sincerity was attributed to the tearful faces as the SALAMANCA test scores rose in clusters A (strange and extravagant) and B (immature and emotionally unstable) of our sample. The present findings highlight the advantages of using eye tracking technology to study non-verbal cues and draw attention to methodological issues that should be taken into account. Further exploration of the relationship between empathy and tear perception could be a fruitful avenue of future research using eye tracking.

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The gender-specific impact of emotional tears

Cited by 22 publications

References 40 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

Pupil dilation reflects the authenticity of received nonverbal vocalizations

How Our Gaze Reacts to Another Person’s Tears? Experimental Insights Into Eye Tracking Technology

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