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It s curious that we cry here s what we know about why

When you think about it, shedding tears from your eyes is rather strange. Why

do we do it? And why might there be differences between men and women?

By Adam Rutherford

30 May 2016

I m a crier. I m not ashamed. I m a man who cries. Not in real life of course,

but when watching movies. I ve not quite worked out what the triggers are, but

they often involve the relationships between parents and children.

Consider the movie Field of Dreams, which is, on paper, a bizarre tale in which

Kevin Costner builds a baseball pitch in the middle of his corn crop because he

heard a voice. Costner thinks he s bringing back the shamed player Shoeless Joe

Jackson from the grave, but actually he ends up meeting (spoiler alert!) his

father as a young man. In those final scenes, I m in pieces.

Field of Dreams is deliberately emotionally manipulative. How about this: I

also cried in The Force Awakens. I sat with my daughter, clutching each other s

hands, and we were both in tears. She s 10. She s also female. According to

society s rules, I supposedly have no such excuse.

If men do cry less, why is that? And what are the benefits of shedding tears?

Is it unusual that I regularly cry as a man? It s just one of the questions I

ve been looking into recently for the BBC Radio 4 series The Curious Cases of

Rutherford and Fry. My co-presenter Hannah and I have been exploring the

science of crying: if men do cry less, why is that? What are the benefits of

shedding tears? And evolutionarily-speaking, why do we even cry at all?

Researchers are still not quite sure why we cry (Credit: Adam Proctor)

The answer to the question of whether I am unusual is straightforward.

According to pretty much every study done, women do cry more than men, and this

result has been consistent since we ve been looking. Psychologist William Frey

s study in 1982 calculated that women cry on average 5.3 times a month, whereas

men in all their manliness only allow eye leakage 1.3 times a month. On average

when a woman cries it s likely to be for five or six minutes, compared with two

or three minutes for a manly weep.

Dutch psychologist Ad Vingerhoets from Tilberg University is the man when it

comes to weeping. He s one of only a few researchers who pursue tears, and his

results have all confirmed that there s a gender dichotomy, and that it starts

in childhood. In infancy crying is gender neutral and universal: all babies do

it equally. (Evolutionary psychologists argue that crying in babies exists as

an acoustic indicator of parental need. I think parents might have already

figured that one out.)

So what explains the gender differences that emerge as children age into

adults? It s clear that cultural factors play a significant role. Indeed,

indirect findings support that notion: studies repeated in different countries

revealed that people cry more in countries where crying is more socially

acceptable. Vingerhoets also found that more weeping occurs in affluent

countries, the implication being that prosperity somehow frees us to be more

emotionally expressive, and turns people into cry-babies.

But he thinks that it s not only social conditioning that restricts men s

crying, but testosterone too. He s reported that prostrate cancer patients

being treated with drugs that lower testosterone levels cry more though you

might argue that they re a bit more emotionally fragile because they ve got

cancer.

(Credit: Adam Proctor)

According to pretty much every study done, women do cry more than men (Credit:

Adam Proctor)

Back to the movies, there is a terrible line from Terminator 2 an otherwise

great film where Arnold Schwarzenegger s titular cyborg from the future

observes the child under his protection having a minor weep after a tough day

(everyone he knows has been murdered), and asks in his robotic Teutonic tones

this simple question: why do you cry?

Here s the answer (spoiler alert!): we don t know.

Humans are the only species that cry for emotional reasons (there was some

suggestion in the past that elephants might cry in mourning, but it hasn t

stood up to scrutiny). It s an oddly under-researched topic. We don t know why

we cry in physical pain. We don t know why we cry from emotional trauma

(so-called psychic tears), or even in moments of great happiness. As we are

such social beasts, it might be an indicator, an external way of conveying

profound and important internal mental state. But this is all guesswork.

Humans are the only species that cry for emotional reasons

Maybe it s catharsis. Another one of Vingerhoet s recent studies attempted to

assess the adage that people feel better after a good cry. In 2015 he asked

volunteers to report their emotional state before watching one of two known

tearjerker movies. One was Life is Beautiful, the Oscar-winning, heart-stirring

tale of a Jewish man coping with the Holocaust through comedy and pathos. The

other was Hachi: A Dog s Tale. They were then asked to fill in the same form

immediately after watching, 20 minutes after and two hours after. The results

were pretty clear: those who didn t cry reported no change in temperament. For

those who cried, their mood significantly improved afterwards, which could be

interpreted as having a cathartic effect. People seemed to feel better after a

good cry.

On The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry radio programme, we like to do small

experiments and replicate studies to answer the questions the listeners send

in, and we decided to replicate the film study. The Fry half of our duo seems

to relish subjecting me to less than joyous experiences in the name of science.

At Hannah s cackling behest, I have endured traffic on the M25, I have been

forced to faint, and most recently had my back waxed. However none of these

compared to the sheer awfulness of watching Hachi: A Dog s Tale to try and

make me cry.

Here is my review: Hachi is a dog who is adopted by Richard Gere. (Spoiler

alert!), Richard Gere dies. Hachi is sad. The end. One can only assume that

Richard Gere had begged the screenwriters for an early release from this

stinker. I didn t cry at Hachi, and (spoiler alert!) I certainly didn't feel

any better, which is in line with Vingerhoet s results. Maybe I should ve let

the floodgates open.