You Might Hate Crying, But Here’s What Research Says
How crying affects us and others
Crying is the first form of communication we master as humans. It’s how babies let us know they need something or that they’re in distress or pain. It also facilitates the strengthening of the parent-child bond. While — according to research — there are no differences between how much male and female children cry, this changes as we get older, with the fairer sex taking the lead in the waterworks department.
Even though emotional tearing seems to be an exclusive domain of Homo sapiens, there’s still so much we don’t know about crying. However, there’s enough evidence to suggest that it might be beneficial to help us flourish psychologically and physically.
To start, it’s important to look at crying from a holistic perspective, what the scientists refer to as crying behaviour. This includes not only our tears but our vocal and facial expressions as well as our subjective emotional experience and the resulting social behaviour: ours and those around us.
Babies
Even though infants and small children — regardless of sex — cry about the same in terms of quantity, they don’t sound the same. A 2022 research paper shows that there is a difference in crying style between the sexes, with the boys tending…
