Why do we cry to such a wide variety of emotions? Anger, sadness, happiness, pain. Why do we cry as a result of all of these emotions?
To express the emotions.
Actually, this really belongs in the great debates section. Medical science has not been able to explain this phenomenon, neither have they been able to explain why we laugh.
We laugh because shit is funny.
County: noted. What I actually meant is doctors and/or scientists don’t know why we have the physical reaction of crying or laughing when we feel emotions or think shit is funny.
Well, laughing and crying are the natural expression of our emotional body.
These are the conscious solution for our endorphins. Many situations (in my life almost daily) call for humor as the most intelligient response to a given situation.
I don’t know which doctors/scientists you are referring to but I certainly don’t believe that fundamental emotional response belong in the debates section.
I do believe that what you laugh at is a reflection of your character(somebody else said that first)
county, I think the point of the question is: why in the world would leaking water from the eyesockets come to signify grief? Similarly, what physiological reason would there be for seeing something funny result in the emanation of a series of explosive sounds? Why don’t we signify grief or pain by having our fingers go rigid or by making an involuntary Bronx cheer?
RR
Oh, you mean like why do we have hands instead of flippers or hair instead of feathers?
Yeah.
We have hands instead of flippers because hands are an evolutionary advantage over flippers for land-dwelling, arboreal creatures. A human or pre-human mutant born with flippers would be less likely to survive and pass that trait on to the genetic pool.
Lots of folks can understand why the above would make sense. But it’s less obvious why there would be an envolutionary advantage to leaking water from one’s eyes when upset. (I’m assuming here that crying-in-respose-to-unpleasant-stimuli is at least partly an inherited trait and not a purely learned one. It’s probably a mixture, but I’m going to wave my magic wand and ignore the learned component.)
Partly, that’s because many of us (even when we know better) persist in thinking of evolution as a “plan” rather than a series of self-selecting accidents.
Is there an evolutionary advantage to leeking water from one’s eyes when upset? Probably not, per se. But there may be an advantage to any behavior that elicits a sympathetic response from others in stressful circumstances. So, given a population that (through a fortunate series of genetic accidents) included many individuals predisposed to behave kindly towards someone with leaking eyes, the first individual to exhibit leaking-eyes would have an evolutionary advantage. That characteristic would then have greater chance of being passed to the gene pool and reinforced in subsequent generations.
Without a predisposition for the general population to respond favorably to a behavior, however, the trait would not be reinforced. If it’s not an actual disadvantage, it might float around the genetic pool for generations, re-emerging in isolated individuals until some change in the environment or an accidental change in the general population made this behavior either a benefit or a drawback to survival.
Just to close up the nature-nurture circle of reasoning a little, it is likely that one must have inherited the ability to learn crying (or whatever learned behaviour you might wish to substitute) or it won’t be learned at all. Much like you can teach a chimp to fear snakes by showing it a video of other chimps reacting in fear to snakes, but if you photoshop a flower in place of the snake, the chimp does not learn to fear a flower.
You don’t have to “learn” to cry! It’s 100% innate. Good lord, have none of you raised a child? They’re crying from the moment they’re born. Your little first-born may have never seen anyone else cry, but it will cry, cry, cry away to get done whatever it wants done. And then when its undeveloped brain neuron system throws a fuse, it will cry for no reason at all. Welcome to parenthood.
LOL - I love that image.
Yes, and that’s why I felt pretty confident about waving my magic wand and ingoring the learned component, if any.
But it would not surprise me one bit to find that there is some learned component to selecting some circumstances in which we cry, particularly as we grow older. So forgive me for trying to cover my backside just in case somebody popped up with an argument that we could not possibly have inherited a tendency to cry at sad movies, weddings, etc.
BTW, I remember reading some research in the past suggesting that infantile attention-getting behaviors are closely tied to ingrained response mechanisms in adults that span many mammalian species. An infant’s cry provokes a physiological anxiety response not only in its own parents, but in most adults of the same species and often across species as well.
In my eyes, there are two types of crying:
1: Baby style bawling, accompanied by scrunched up face and wailing.
2: Relatively silent apart from sobs, tears running down cheek. Often exhibited by Samurais and Native American, accompanied by idealistic splashing of tears into reflective pond.
Oddly, type 1 seems to be replaced by type 2 as a child grows up. When was the last time you saw an adult bawling? You get angry fits of rage, but those are without the crying and usually in response to different emotions.
Type 1 has an obvious evolutionary advantage. Which baby will last longer – the one that does not wail when its unhappy or the one that does? Granted, they seem to wail a bit too much, but you get the point.
Type 2 is inexplicable. Perhaps this is learnt and replaces the natural crying. Perhaps amongst grown humans, the sobbing is less annoying and more likely to elicit sympathy. I can only speculate on this point – this is what I perceive to be the more mysterious side of crying.
We laugh because shit is funny.
We cry because shit happens.
And sometimes funny shit happens, and we laugh so hard we cry.
ClayC852-
It’s called homeostasis. The ability or tendency of an organism or cell to maintain internal equilibrium by adjusting its physiological processes. Emotions (anger, laughter, grief, joy) create a change in our bodies. Neurotransmitters…scratch that, lets keep this simple. Chemical changes occur, and our bodies react to that change. “Excess chemicals” are released through our tears. Ever notice how you really feel better after a long hard cry? It’s your body expelling the “excess” and reestablishing homeostasis.
ClayC852-
It’s called homeostasis. The ability or tendency of an organism or cell to maintain internal equilibrium by adjusting its physiological processes. Emotions (anger, laughter, grief, joy) create a change in our bodies. Neurotransmitters…scratch that, lets keep this simple. Chemical changes occur, and our bodies react to that change. “Excess chemicals” are released through our tears. Ever notice how you really feel better after a long hard cry? It’s your body expelling the “excess” and reestablishing homeostasis.
Umm, that’s the evolutionary advantage, is it not?
Lots of human adaptations, or adaptations in other animals for that matter, are based on communicating emotions to others. That is quite obviously why humans cry; as Walloon points out, kids cry from the moment they’re born. Crying is an instinctive behaviour used to elicit empathy in others, like a lot of behaviours we have. There are obvious evolutionary advantages for a social animal to have ways of communicating emotion.
As to why adults cry, it’s the same basic reason, even if the behaviour is manifested a little differently. Behaviours that return us to childlike behaviour are pretty common. For instance, couples treat each other like kids - silly baby talk, stroking behaviours, grooming, stuff like that - because it’s a sign of comfort and caring.
Similar behaviours can be seen in other animals; watch dogs interact and watch the pupplylike behaviours they will use to demonstrate submissiveness or affection, depending on the social dynamic. Cats display similar behaviours, crying out like kittens when frightened or in need of something in an effort to be comforted or cared for.
I’m gonna make a WAG that backs up what a few others have said. I think it relates to social communication and bonding. Within a social group be it a tribe of humans or a pride of lions, there needs to be methods of expressing feelings and thoughts to the rest of the group. Biologically the group almost functions as a single organism, interdependent. Sure, you could get by without the group but it’s a whole lot harder. To signal other parts of the social organism we have evolved a complex series of physcical signals. Crying is one. An individual makes a cry response and the group responds. The group is closer knit and more responsive and adaptive to stressors. A similar theory exists about yawns.
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030728/030728-2.html
It may act a signal of tiredness to the rest of the group, indicating they should rest or sleep.
However, I’m pulling most of this out of my buttocks so I could be wrong.
Actually, there are three kinds of tears. BASAL tears lubricate your eyeball. REFLEX tears protect your eyes against irritants, such as onions, foreign objects or blows. And lastly, EMOTIONAL tears and these are very different from the other two. Emotional tears contain 20-25 percent more protein and include various hormones…as I said before, our body shedding ‘excess’ to stabilize. Homeostasis.