Emotional Rollercoaster: A Journey Through the Science of Feelings

A more extreme suggestion is proposed by Anthony Stevens and John Price in their book Evolutionary Psychiatry. This is the idea that in hunter-gatherer communities depression was a useful protective mechanism. A person who stopped contributing to the community could be cast out and at that time ostracisation could well result in death. Instead people who feared they were of no use to their community would become depressed. They would then be considered ill and cared for rather than thrown out. In many societies today this is not quite so successful because the community might not rally round, leaving a person isolated. The problem with this theory is that it fails to explain why a person’s view of themselves becomes so negative in the first place. Many people become depressed despite knowing they are valued by those around them.

An alternative approach to the purpose of sadness is to view it as an effective signal to others that you are in need of help. However, once again there are contradictions. At the very time they might benefit from the care of others, unhappy people often turn inwards, eschewing company. Moreover there isn’t a universal response to another person’s sadness. There’s no guarantee that telling someone that you feel sad will bring you help. It will depend on both the individual and the culture. Anthropologists have attempted to look at attitudes towards sadness around the world, but once the word ‘sadness’ is translated into another language it might not have precisely the same meaning. One clever study overcame the translation problem through the use of photographs of facial expressions. People were asked to label the expressions in their own language and these were then translated into English by a native speaker. Through this method it was found that there are five types of sadness in the Greek language and six in Japanese. Therefore elements of sadness might be universal, but it might not be a single, basic emotion in all cultures. In some societies sadness is viewed as an acceptable emotion only for women or children. This happens to an extent in Western societies, where unhappy women are more likely to experience symptoms of depression, while men are more likely to express their misery through violence. If the purpose of sadness is to attract help, then it’s a system lacking in efficiency because help is not always forthcoming. Many would prefer to spend an evening with somebody cheerful than listen to the woes of another.

So, we cannot be certain of the evolutionary purpose of sadness. It could involve elements of all these theories – an emotion which slows us down, gives us time to reflect and if necessary change plans, whilst signalling to others that we need them and thus strengthening those bonds. Certainly our faces are remarkably good at conveying our feelings when it comes to sadness.

the sad face

If sadness is to serve any communicative purpose, it needs to be obvious. When Darwin spent time studying the way the face expresses misery he noted that in many different cultures pulling down the corners of the mouth indicated sadness, hence the phrase ‘down in the mouth’. What intrigues me about the facial expression of sadness is that it’s usually more fleeting than the experience of sadness. You might feel sad for days, but only look sad some of the time. Concealing your feelings is possible, if tiring. As I discussed in the last chapter, fake smiles can be detected due to the lack of involvement of the muscles around the eyes. Darwin describes sitting opposite a woman in a railway carriage who looked perfectly content, but for the fact that the corners of her mouth were turned down. This revealed her true feelings. Even a slight turning down of the corners of the mouth conveys sadness. I’ve suffered from this myself. When my mouth is closed and not moving, there’s a slight tendency for the corners to turn down and people often ask me whether I’m miserable when in fact I’m just concentrating. A few months ago I was standing waiting to meet a friend in Chinatown in London, feeling perfectly contented, when a policeman approached me to ask whether I was all right. He and his colleagues had seen me on the closed circuit camera screens in their van and thought I looked so sad and anxious that they wondered whether I was being followed. The same sort of thing used to happen to my grandfather, whose mouth was also wont to turn down.

In Tierra del Fuego local people tried to explain to Darwin that the captain of the boat was feeling sad by pulling down their cheeks with both hands to make the face as long as possible. Darwin went to great lengths to explain another feature of the expression of sadness which he called ‘obliquity of the eyebrows’. The ends of the eyebrows nearest the nose are raised, causing the brow to furrow slightly. He calls this the grief muscle and notes that although it is contracted when we feel sad, only some people can move it voluntarily, an ability which seems to be inherited. The world-renowned expert on facial expressions, Paul Ekman, has studied identical twins who were raised apart and discovered that if one twin is able to flex this muscle, so can the other.

Along with general posture and tone of voice, facial expressions help us to spot emotions in others, but while some people are excellent at reading these signals and working out how another person is feeling, others won’t even notice. In fact the emotions we are best at observing in others are the same emotions we are experiencing ourselves. Therefore, although one might expect a depressed person to be too unhappy and concerned with their own misery to notice how someone else is feeling, in fact it’s the reverse. Depressed people are the fastest to spot depression in others, while happy people are best at noticing the emotions of other happy people. It’s almost as though the feelings we are currently experiencing ourselves are so strong in our consciousness that we find ourselves drawn to that feeling in others.

the sad mind and the sad body

Three years ago Julia wheeled her trolley past an empty customs desk. Her trip to Vietnam had been fantastic and as usual when she was tanned and rested, she felt great. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone had come to meet her? To her surprise she saw that someone had. Her sister’s boyfriend was leaning grimly on the barrier, but it wasn’t nice at all. Why was he here? What had gone wrong? Had her mother’s cancer come back? No, it wasn’t that. He told her that everyone was safe, but that her parents’ thatched cottage in Suffolk had burnt down. Julia was devastated. ‘It was a 400-year-old cottage and my dad had lived there since he was ten. When I got back to my sister’s house she showed me the front page of the local paper and there was a picture of my dad who’s an artist, holding one of his pictures with the headline, “Artist Loses Life’s Work” and he was crying. It felt as though I were looking at a newspaper that had been used as a prop in a film. I kept thinking that my kids will never see the house where I grew up. I think when sadness is at its worst you wake up and for five seconds you think everything’s OK and then you have this sudden shock that something’s happened. It’s almost like someone’s pressing an iron bar down on your chest. True sadness to me is like a physical pain. My heart actually hurt for weeks and weeks.’

It is true that sadness has physical effects on the body. Skin conductance, associated with sweating, increases and even intestinal processes can change. A patient called Tom, from a case study in 1943, had a stomach which became pale whenever he was depressed and, back in the 1920s, it was found during other research that depressed patients secreted less gastric acid into their stomachs than usual. There are also hormonal differences between the depressed and the non-depressed. About half of those with depression seem to have abnormally high blood levels of the hormone Cortisol which is released during times of stress under the control of a brain system called the HPA axis. This causes a cascade of chemical reactions. A small area of the brain called the hypothalamus (H) organises activities such as sex-drive and the control of body temperature. It releases a hormone which affects the pituitary gland (P) which in turn causes the adrenal glands (A) above the kidneys, to produce the stress hormone Cortisol, hence the name HPA axis. Crucially, for some people this control system doesn’t seem to work, resulting in an excess of Cortisol.

Naturally the main organ affected by sadness is the brain. There are changes in the levels of neurotransmitters or chemical messengers which communicate between the millions of neurons in the brain in a kind of relay race. One of the most important is serotonin which is ejected in a burst every millisecond and seems to have an involvement in almost everything that happens in the brain, without having the sole responsibility for any single function. When we feel depressed serotonin levels are lower. This is the basis on which anti-depressants like Prozac work. Prozac is an SSRI or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Normally when serotonin is squirted out of the nerve ending it acts on receptors in the brain and if too much is released it’s taken back up into the nerve endings so that it can be recycled. The idea of drugs like SSRIs is to block this process, so that instead of being taken back up, the serotonin can spend longer in contact with the receptor and have more of an effect on mood. The effect, however, is far from immediate. When Julia took Prozac when she was depressed it was a few weeks before she noticed a difference. ‘You take it for a few days and you wonder why you’re bothering because you still feel terrible. Then very gradually it starts to work. It’s not as though you suddenly feel high or happy; it’s more as though your real self has been covered up and something in the tablets uncovers it and lets you be yourself again.’

If SSRIs can increase the amount of serotonin which is active in the brain and serotonin can make you feel happier, then it should follow that we could all feel more cheerful if we took an SSRI. However, in a non-depressed person these drugs have no effect on mood because of the way that serotonin operates in the brain. It’s not like dopamine, the neurotransmitter which causes us to feel joyful. If you are not depressed then SSRIs make no difference to the way you feel. In fact, even lowering your levels of serotonin artificially leaves your mood constant if there is no history of depression in yourself or your family, suggesting that a vulnerability to depression is the key. If you have had depression before and your serotonin levels are lowered medically then you will feel depressed once again. For some reason studies have found that women’s serotonin levels are easier to lower artificially, while men’s brains appear to be better able to compensate for these chemical changes induced in a lab. Phil Cowen, a psychopharmacology professor at Oxford University who has worked on SSRIs for several years, described this phenomenon as a little like a scar. Once you’ve had depression the scar remains. Somehow those pathways in the brain have been disrupted. It’s also complicated by a natural variation in the number of receptors for serotonin that each person has. It can only have an effect if there are receptors to receive it.

a diagnosis of depression

The distinction between depression and sadness could be classified as a differentiation created by society. Extreme, prolonged sadness can reach a point where friends and family are unable to help. At that point, as with Chloe, they entreat the person to seek professional help and the symptoms are labelled as an illness – clinical depression. This diagnosis came as a great relief to Chloe, providing her with an explanation for her feelings whilst absolving others of any blame.

Symptoms of clinical depression fall into four categories, but a person doesn’t have to experience all of them for a diagnosis of depression. The most obvious are the emotional symptoms. People are often saddest and most tearful in the mornings, using words like ‘blue’, ‘hopeless’ and ‘lonely’ to describe their mood. It can be accompanied by anxiety and a lack of pleasure in normally enjoyable activities such as eating tasty food or seeing friends. Then there are the physical changes – waking very early in the morning, loss of appetite and loss of interest in sex. The third type of symptom concerns motivation. Depressed people usually find it very hard to get started on projects, or to make decisions.

Finally and most intriguingly there are the cognitive symptoms – those associated with thoughts. Even feeling slightly sad can affect the way a person thinks. This can be illustrated by a simple word experiment: participants listen to either happy or sad music through headphones. Afterwards they sit in front of a computer and letters are flashed up on the screen. This is a standard psychological test called a lexical decision task, where the letters on the screen sometimes form a word and sometimes don’t. The task is to identify the real words as quickly as possible. Those who had been listening to happy music were faster at spotting the words associated with happiness like ‘delight’, while the people who heard sad music identified the sad words like ‘weep’ the fastest. If the way the brain processes words is affected by a temporary music-induced mood then for a clinically depressed person these changes will last much longer. Unfortunately these shifts in thinking can help to maintain a person’s depression.

Depressed people often perceive themselves to be useless and begin to believe that anything that goes wrong must be their fault. Imagine what you would think after you’d accidentally dropped a glass and broken it. If you’re not depressed you might be briefly annoyed with yourself, but as you cleared up the fragments of glass, you would probably console yourself with the fact that it was an accident and that these things happen. A depressed person is more likely to blame themselves, to see it as further proof that everything always goes wrong for them and that it always will. The depressed person looks round for evidence to support their view that everything’s hopeless, while dismissing any good fortune as pure chance. Addressing these sorts of thoughts provides the basis for cognitive therapy for depression.

Chloe found that her depression forced her to stop and take stock of her life. She felt that she had been so happy previously that she hadn’t been sufficiently self-analytical. A tragedy in her life also provided something of a turning point. A few months after starting on Prozac she was feeling slightly better and went to Australia to visit a friend, but became very depressed once more. Then on 12th September 2001 she heard that a friend of hers was missing after the destruction of the twin towers in New York. She flew to New York to help his wife in her search, but he had been killed. For the first time in years, Chloe found that someone else needed her help and she couldn’t be the sad person anymore. After five weeks in New York, helping her friend to arrange a memorial service, she realised that she was able to deal with practicalities and, despite her grief, she found that she could do something she had not done for a long time – laugh.

why do only some people become depressed?

Traditionally, an expert’s answer to this question depends on the theoretical background in which they are working. One of the most plausible explanations and one that we can all relate to, is that social factors play a large part. It wouldn’t be surprising for depression to be present in a tough life where lots of things go wrong. A landmark study conducted in the seventies by two British sociologists George W. Brown and Tirril Harris, found that the biggest risk factors for depression in women were caring for three children under the age of five, with no family or friends in whom to confide, and having lost a mother before the age of eleven.

However, your chances of getting depressed might have been set in stone long before adulthood, even before birth. If one of your parents or siblings suffers from clinical depression it makes the likelihood of you becoming depressed between one-and-a-half and three times more likely. This doesn’t prove that depression is simply a genetic condition. Instead you might learn from a parent or sibling that depression is the best way to respond when things are going badly. A different person might turn to violence or alcohol abuse instead. Twin studies are the standard way of separating the influence of genetics from the effect of life experiences – in other words nature and nurture. The theory is that if identical twins are brought up separately then any differences between them must be down to the environment rather than genetics, because both twins have the same genes. If one identical twin develops depression there’s almost a fifty-fifty chance that the other twin will too, indicating a role for both genetics and life experiences. However, it’s not simply the case that there is one gene which predisposes you to depression, or not as far as we know. For some reason various genes seem to be implicated.

Other researchers believe that to get to the root of depression we should study chemical changes in the brain. However, this need not rule out the influence of the environment. The work on serotonin is a good example of how all these factors can work together. Studies of monkeys in the early 1990s demonstrated that the dominant members of the group had higher serotonin levels, but that these levels weren’t permanent. If a monkey was removed from the group by the experimenters its serotonin levels fell. The same thing could happen in humans. You lose your job, which affects your feelings about your status, which causes your serotonin levels to fall, with the result that you feel sad. Low serotonin levels tend to have different effects on men and women; women are more likely to become depressed while there’s some evidence that low serotonin levels in men lead to aggression. In the monkey studies it was found that after the dominant monkey had been removed, the serotonin levels of whichever monkey took its place would rise. Interestingly, if a monkey’s serotonin levels were artificially boosted, the monkey appeared to show an improvement in social skills and began rising through the group and, provided the dominant male was absent, could even take his place. If their levels were artificially lowered they would lose status.

Trying this out on people, Alyson Bond gave them SSRIs for four weeks and then gave them various games to play as well as asking their flatmates to report back on any changes they might have noticed while living with them. During the games the people on SSRIs made more eye contact while they were speaking and less while the other person spoke – a sign of dominance. They also became more cooperative during the game, while their flatmates reported them to be less submissive than they used to be. This suggests that high levels of serotonin increased both their dominance and made them more cooperative. Although these two results might sound contradictory, in fact this fits in with the pattern seen in monkeys. Those of high status aren’t necessarily more aggressive, but they are better at getting on with other monkeys.

So it appears that success can boost serotonin levels and high serotonin levels can lead to success, possibly through getting on with other people better, which might seem somewhat unfair. Those who are already happy and have high serotonin levels are likely to continue to succeed in society and remain happy, while those with lower levels – the very people for whom success could make a big difference – get left behind and their levels remain low. Most of the work in this area involves animals and so it can’t be guaranteed that the same effects would be seen in humans. However, a study conducted in Pittsburgh in 2000 found that the people with lower socio-economic status have a blunted response to a particular drug, which in turn suggests that they have a low turnover of serotonin. Since people with lower socioeconomic status are known on average to experience a greater number of stressful life events and to be exposed to more episodes of physical and psychological violence, the researchers speculate that these negative experiences could be altering the brain in such a way that the turnover of serotonin is reduced long-term.

This illustrates that the search for chemical explanations does not rule out the role that life events can play in the way we feel. Our mood is not predicted solely by the quantities of certain chemicals in our brain. Changes in these chemicals might simply be a reflection of influences from outside, so when things go wrong in life the balance of chemicals can shift. Early experiences could even play a part by affecting the way in which the brain copes with changes in neurotransmitter levels.

Earlier in this chapter the stress hormone Cortisol was mentioned. If it is the case that some depressed people have a problem with the system regulating Cortisol, then as with serotonin function the same question remains: why has the system gone wrong in those particular people? They might have been born with a predisposition to release excess Cortisol, or once again their experiences might actually alter the system. Charles Nemeroff from Emory University, Atlanta, has found that newborn rats who were separated from their mothers for ten out of the first twenty-one days of life, grew up with increased levels of the hormone. This suggests that early negative experiences might rewire the brain in terms of its response to stress. This hypothesis is based on animal studies, so is not entirely conclusive, but Nemeroff might have finally hit on a biochemical explanation for how bad childhood experiences could link to depression in adulthood.

Not everyone believes that Cortisol or serotonin holds the chemical answers to depression. There is a new theory, admittedly very much in its infancy, that the immune system could be involved. The idea is that people with problems with the immune system respond in one of two ways – either they develop an auto-immune disease or they become depressed. Women are more prone to both of these conditions. It is even possible that drugs like SSRIs are acting not only on serotonin but on the immune system and the Cortisol system in addition, which could explain why the drugs take several weeks to have an effect.

Again, these chemical changes in the brain could sometimes be a response to the outside world, rather than the brain spontaneously malfunctioning by itself. It’s arguable that we should no longer consider the physiological and the social to be separate. They affect each other, which would explain why drug treatments and talking therapies – which couldn’t be more different from each other – can both relieve depression.

the mystery of tears

Two years before her parents’ house burned down Julia was on holiday in Brisbane with her mother, who was recovering from cancer. Julia had recently called off her wedding and still felt desperately sad, but not wanting to add to her mother’s troubles she put on a brave face and tried to enjoy the holiday. Night-time provided the chance to cry. Once her mother was asleep she lay in the next bed weeping silently. Two weeks into the holiday her mother asked her why she was crying so often, admitting that she had listened to her sobbing every single night and didn’t want to be protected from Julia’s sadness just because she was ill.

Julia was grieving for the loss of the future she’d imagined for herself and was keen not to add to another person’s distress by discussing it. These responses both make sense. What is stranger is that a clear liquid should fall out of her eyes because she’s unhappy. It’s easy to see how tears wash out your eye and protect the surface from a sharp speck of dust or an eyelash, but why do we cry when we’re upset? In physical terms a bout of sobbing blocks the nose, irritates the eyes, puffs up the face and makes the head ache, yet sometimes we can’t help but weep.

A group of volunteers file into a makeshift cinema in a lecture theatre at the St Paul-Ramsey Medical Center in Minnesota, USA. They sit and watch a film about some children who are caring for their dying mother, only a year after their father died. It’s a film which openly manipulates the emotions. The phrase ‘tugging at the heart strings’ could have been invented for it. After they’ve lost both parents the children stand in a line in the snow while the eldest boy bravely declares that he will look after his young brothers and sisters. Meanwhile the heartless elders of the town just want rid of the lot of them. The volunteers watching the film have never met. They sit in silence wearing special goggles which have miniature buckets suspended beneath the eye-pieces. The reason they are here is to provide tears.

After years spent studying crying Professor William Frey has found that this is the easiest way to make tears come forth. Unfortunately the special glasses didn’t work because tears escaped down the criers’ cheeks. In the end he found it was easiest to have people collect their own tears in tiny test tubes. He experimented with different films and seating arrangements, eventually concluding that spacing was the key. When people are close to a stranger they hold back the tears.

Professor Frey went to all this trouble because he wanted to know whether tears of sadness contained different chemicals from the tears we cry when our eyes water due to soreness or irritation (known as irritant tears). He was drawn to the topic because he himself hadn’t cried since he was a boy and felt he might be missing out. Studies have shown that, like Professor Frey, some people don’t cry at all in a month, while it’s been found that others cry on up to twenty-nine days of the month. There are of course social rules prescribing when it is and isn’t appropriate to cry, particularly when it comes to boys. When my father was in pain in hospital after a tonsillectomy at the age of four, a nurse told him that boys don’t cry and that if he did people would think he was a girl. In fact despite this kind of social pressure, boys cry just as often as girls until the age of twelve, but by adulthood women are crying four times as often as men. Teenage girls are no more depressed than boys which has led to suggestions that the sudden difference in their crying frequency from the age of thirteen might be caused by the increase in girls in the hormones oestrogen and prolactin. However, studies on crying during pregnancy and pre-menstrual crying have been inconclusive, making hormonal explanations tricky. Of course it’s been assumed that the teenage boys are behaving normally by crying rarely while the behaviour of teenage girls needs some explanation, hence the hormonal theories. If you turn this idea on its head, perhaps there’s something about puberty that stops boys crying. Is it possible that increased levels of testosterone somehow block the crying response? When small mammals were given testosterone injections they vocalised less. It is also the case that as men get older they begin to cry often once again, just as their testosterone levels drop. Alternatively maybe they start holding back the tears when they reach adolescence for fear of someone seeing them and by the time they reach old age they simply worry less about a witness to their crying.

Weeping rates also vary from culture to culture. A researcher, Marleen Becht, spent three years collecting data from twenty-nine countries. She found that both men and women from the United States cried the most often, while Bulgarian men and Icelandic and Romanian women cried the least. It’s hard to know exactly what to make of that. For a start in some countries only thirty individuals were asked, which can’t tell you much about the habits of an entire nation. Moreover, these comparisons are based on each person’s own estimate of the number of times they had cried in the last four weeks. Cultural attitudes towards crying might influence the amount of crying to which people are prepared to confess. Having said this, when I visited Iceland I couldn’t help thinking about the rarity of tears there and found myself watching to see if I could spot any moist eyes. Disappointingly the guide didn’t burst into tears at the sight of a beautiful, white, double waterfall, but to be fair, he probably visited it every day.

Research also tells us that the most likely time for crying is between 7pm and 9pm. This isn’t surprising; it might be the first time all day that a person has had any privacy and the factors likely to induce crying are all present – tiredness, sad TV programmes and family arguments. There’s also the possibility that the circadian rhythms which govern our sleep cycle play a part. Babies cry the most in the evenings, why not adults?

Tears of sorrow seem to be unique to humans, although there are anecdotal reports from Darwin of Indian elephants weeping when they are bound and immobilised. Professor Frey wrote to lots of zoologists and animal trainers to see whether they had witnessed such events. Most said that they had not but he has received anecdotal reports from pet owners who report seeing all sorts of animals shedding tears – from pigs to Chihuahuas. Diane Fossey, who famously spent years studying mountain gorillas, described witnessing Coco, a three-year-old captive gorilla, looking out of the window and shedding actual tears. I was tempted to write ‘looking out of the window longingly’, but that would have been my interpretation of the gorilla’s emotions and therein lies the problem. The trouble with these reports of weeping animals is the all too human tendency to anthropomorphise. It’s hard to distinguish what an animal is feeling from the way we imagine we would feel in the same situation.

zeis, manz and the crypts of henle

In humans, at least, we do understand something of the chemical constituents of tears. They were first analysed back in 1791 and were found to consist of salt, mucus and water. Most of the watery part comes from the lachrymal glands which are at the top outer edge of each eye. This liquid is sandwiched between inner and outer layers which come from glands with such wonderful names as Zeis, Moll, Manz and the crypts of Henle. The oily top layer stops the liquid from evaporating too fast. When we blink tears slide across the surface of the eye towards the inner corner, but if we cry the tears collect in triangular lakes until they overflow, slipping over the edge of the eyelid and down the cheek.

During the first two or three months of life newborn babies don’t shed tears when they cry. Darwin believed that as babies grow older they develop the ability to cry in order to protect the eyeballs when they screw up their faces in distress. He noted that in every culture extreme laughter, yawning and vomiting also brought tears rolling down the cheeks and concluded that the cause must be the same. When the face is screwed up, he reasoned, the blood vessels around the eye become engorged and tears are needed to protect the surface of the eye. He decided to capitalise on his children’s propensity for tears to test his theory, asking them to contract the muscles around their eyes as tightly as possible for as long as they could, believing that this would induce the production of tears. However, none were forthcoming. He did not let this dissuade him from his theory, concluding that his children were simply unable to produce voluntary contractions of sufficient strength. Tears of sorrow must exist to protect the eyes, he contended, because identical tears are shed when a speck of dust is lodged in the eye.

This is where Darwin was wrong and his assumption takes us to the heart of William Frey’s research. As well as devising methods of inducing sadness to make people cry, Frey experimented with substances which would irritate the eye sufficiently to produce tears. Ammonia and tear gas were ruled out for ethical reasons. Instead he gave his volunteers various other substances to inhale including fresh horseradish, but in the end it was the old cliché – onions – which really made them weep. Even in Shakespeare’s time these were the old crying standby. In The Taming of the Shrew a boy who is acting the part of the woman is advised,

And if the boy not have a woman’s gift,

To rain a shower of commanded tears,

An onion will do well for such a shift.

As well as watching over-sentimentalised films, Professor Frey’s brave volunteers had to put their faces over a blender full of freshly chopped onions and inhale deeply with their eyes open for about three minutes. The moment an onion is cut a substance called thiopropanal-S-oxide is released into the air. When it reaches the tear film on the eye there’s a chemical reaction which produces sulphuric acid, so not surprisingly it stings. The only way to stop the reaction is to cover up the eyeball or to stop the substance escaping into the air in the first place. Hence the two successful methods for avoiding streaming eyes are washing the chemical away by peeling onions under water or wearing contact lenses to prevent the vapour reaching the surface of the eye.

When Frey came to analyse the two types of tears he found that tears are not all the same; the emotional tears contained 24% more protein than the irritant tears. The purpose of these proteins in the tears is to fight infection and to control the levels of acidity on the eyeball. This suggests that something special is happening when we shed emotional tears – an expulsion of chemicals perhaps. For this to have any emotional benefit these substances would need to have an association with stress, but as far as we know there isn’t a clear link between stress and these proteins. However, when Frey dissected whole tear glands he did discover the presence of two hormones known to be related to stress – ACTH and leucine-enkephalin. The former is also found in tears themselves. He believes that when we cry we expel toxic substances which are byproducts of the stress we’re experiencing. The idea is that you flush them out through your eyes with the result that you feel slightly better. Indeed he did find that 85% of females and 73% of men reported feeling better after a good cry. Even the existence of the phrase ‘a good cry’ suggests that it’s seen as useful. I saw a TV advert recently for a CD of ‘All-Time Classic Tearjerkers – the most moving tunes for times of reflection’. The very title accepts that sometimes people want to cry and these sad tunes might help them along.

However, attempts to demonstrate the beneficial effects of crying in a laboratory haven’t quite worked. It ought to be simple. Ask people to rate their emotional state, show them a sad film, wait for them to finish crying and then ask them to rate their emotional state again to see whether there’s been an improvement. Unfortunately there’s usually no difference, suggesting that it’s not the expulsion of toxins through tears that makes you feel better. Perhaps you only feel better if those tears encourage someone else to comfort you. There is a big problem, however, with extrapolation from such an artificial situation to real life. When you cry during a sad film you are simply empathising with the characters and imagining yourself in that situation, which is rather different from feeling so helpless in your own life that you cry. Moreover, the situation is inevitably going to affect the way you feel after crying. At home a good cry might lead to a sense of relief, but at work or in a laboratory you might end up feeling awkward or embarrassed.

There is another possibility for the discrepancy between people’s own reports of feeling better after crying and the laboratory experiments. The mind doesn’t assign equal importance to the creation and storage of memories of different events. We all have biases that affect what we remember. It helps us to justify our crying behaviour if we only recall the times it made us feel better.

the message of tears

Randy Cornelius sat in a studio at his local radio station WSPK in Poughkeepsie, USA – the radio station promising to play ‘today’s best music’. He’s a psychology professor at Vassar College and was waiting to be connected to the gloomy cupboard of a studio where I was sitting at the BBC in London, waiting to interview him for a radio series. It took a while and I could hear various engineers from both the British and American ends come over the headphones. Then, another voice with an American accent, ‘Hello, hello, can anybody hear me?’ I wasn’t sure whether I’d reached the man himself or another engineer. ‘Are you Randy?’ I asked. ‘I sure am,’ he said, causing mirth at the British end, but not a flicker from the States, where it doesn’t have quite the same meaning. Once it was established that the link between the studios was working, we went on to have a serious discussion about crying.