Tears aren't excretory or cathartic? Maybe this guy hasn't been through the right kind of situation.
When one of my kids was going through a health crisis I did a heck of a lot of lone crying. Each time internal stress and anxiety would build, my guts would get all churned up, then it would reach the point where I would cry and the "symptoms" would all reduce dramatically before starting to build up again.
I was amazed at the time that crying had such a noticeable effect on physical symptoms. I thought I must be dumping something, adrenalin?, out my tear ducts.
I'm probably wrong, though it's not the kind of set up you can test in a lab.
I don't think his point is that it isn't cathartic; he's pointing out that there is no physiological reason for crying in particular to have evolved to be cathartic. What have leaking eyes or a quavering respiratory system got to do with relieving overwhelming emotions? Nothing. And no other animals experience this.
It's a confusion of cause and effect (or post-hoc fallacy). "I cry because it makes me feel better" supposes that feeling better is the purpose of crying. But really it's the other way around: Crying is the purpose of feeling better. Crying is the thing with purpose, because it's an important and useful social signal. Overpowering urges to succumb to it, and feeling better after having done so, are evolution's way of coaxing our minds to do something that's useful to us, just like urges to eat or have sex, and feeling better after having done them.
"The phrase "having a good cry" suggests that crying can actually make you feel physically and emotionally better, which many people believe. Some scientists agree with this theory, asserting that chemicals build up in the body during times of elevated stress. These researchers believe that emotional crying is the body's way of ridding itself of these toxins and waste products.
In fact, one study collected both reflex tears and emotional tears (after peeling an onion and watching a sad movie, respectively). When scientists analyzed the content of the tears, they found each type was very different. Reflex tears are generally found to be about 98 percent water, whereas several chemicals are commonly present in emotional tears [Source: The Daily Journal. First is a protein called prolactin, which is also known to control breast milk production. Adrenocorticotropic hormones are also common and indicate high stress levels. The other chemical found in emotional tears is leucine-enkephalin, an endorphin that reduces pain and works to improve mood. Of course, many scientists point out that research in this area is very limited and should be further studied before any conclusion can be made."
Crying can, quite literally, act like a stress valve!
I never cried tears of happiness when the primary sex hormone in my system was testosterone. Now that estrogen is, I cry all the time. Not just from hormones, but also from how happy I am not not be living a lie anymore. And sometimes for absolutely no reason whatsoever. And it's emotionally cathartic as fuck.
This entire thing is so anecdotal and from-personal-experience, it's not remotely interesting in its attempts to generalize.
I don't think you are wrong. I've had the experiences of deep grief before. Crying and tears can be cathartic; they can also result from feeling something profoundly moving, usually resting on a deep undertone of sadness.
It also sucks when you have a lot of sadness and grief bottled up -- yet for whatever reason, you can't cry.
I will also note: judgement is a subtle form of disgust.
Dr. Eckman has a great Atlas of Emotions: http://atlasofemotions.org/ which is a great starting point for differentiating between the culturally-universal emotions and the myriad of emotional states.
From my personal experience though, the best way to study and make sense of emotions is to experience them. Intellectualizing emotions without experiencing them is not sufficient.
Any number of mechanisms could serve this purpose, though: urination, sweating, blowing your nose. Why should these chemicals leave our eyes? I believe that is what the author is trying to answer.
Many features of human physiology serve more than one function -- our eyebrow ridges protect our eyes from sun, dust, getting punched. I don't mean to reject your idea; but it doesn't seem to go very far towards explaining why tears are the way they are.
I had the same reaction when reading that, but I think the author was mainly trying to make the point that there is no reason a priori to attribute direct psychological properties to lacrimal secretions.
There's a while lot more to crying than just the tears.
It's a key piece to his thesis, and it's tripe. It's like saying exercise can't make you feel better because sweat glands don't excrete excess norepinephrine .
The question of why humans cry is always fascinating, since it's such an instinctive behavior we don't seem to realize how bizarre it is. I tried a little to develop a deliberately insane theory to submit to BAHfest (SMBC's festival of bad scientific hypotheses http://www.bahfest.com) and proposed that crying exists to blind us during periods of great emotional stress, since we'd otherwise be prone to irrational and dangerous behavior. Unfortunately, compared with the real attempts to explain tears, it seemed a little too plausible to be bad! When the state of research has someone proposing "we cry because of the soot flying into our eyes at prehistoric funeral pyres," it's hard to be deliberately weird. (I eventually came up with a much funnier topic, so swing by if you're in the area shameless plug etc)
Across species eye contact is a thing for both carnivore/herbivore dynamics and also dominance hierarchies so if you intentionally wanted to create a weird theory I'd suggest mixing those in weird ways.
So if a hunter gets hurt while hunting he could screw up the hunt for everyone by being hurt except for crying messes up his eye to eye stare down so he temporarily falls to the bottom of the dominance hierarchy allowing the overall tribe better luck hunting and more meat for everyone including himself, therefore cry in pain, in the long run equals more delicious meat. Stalking being more a carnivore behavior than herbivore I'd theorize crying is extremely manly and women carried the trait originally rather than directly benefiting by expressing the trait.
The vegan types can be very vociferous when presented with commentary about the biology of the human body appearing to have evolved to support meat eating, so be careful, its very politically incorrect to look into things like cross species carnivore eye contact behaviors or apparently evolutionary evidence of stalking and hunting biological technologies.
As a parent, it seems like a glaring omission that most crying is done by babies. It's right there in the article that humans have the "most dependent babies," and signaling behaviors are often repurposed responses, so it's a good starting point to say that crying (with big inhales and audible sobs) evolved as a "baby in distress" alarm, in which a baby makes a lot of noise because it needs help. We go to that place when we feel small or want the kind of support a parent would give.
Babies often don't have tears for the first few months, but I'm not sure that's important. I do think they play a role on the playground, and a lot of the speculation about their effects in social situations sounds right. I don't have any ideas to contribute on why crying is accompanied by tears.
In any other species, wearing a signal that advertises, "I recently lost in a dominance challenge," is a strict liability — an invitation for others to pile on, opportunistically, and attack you while you're down (or else to mentally note that you're no longer a good, strong ally). There's no upside, therefore, to using anything other than a quick facial expression or flash of body language, to show your submission only to the aggressor.
That sounds like an overly harsh picture of non-humans to me! I'm pretty sure at least certain apes help their potentially-non-kin in distress. Humans aren't the only social mammals.
I found the preamble a tad confusing. It seems to imply that all our evolutionary behaviours aim at solving a problem. I had understood that they are simply the emergent phenomenon of selection - in other words they are the behaviours associated with successful individuals/groups. Is this just a sort of shorthand - assigning a kind of design _intention_ to Nature as a simpler way of expressing this? If so, isn't it anyway the case that not all selected behaviours do actually solve a problem, but are sometimes just a case of "stuff that became associated with success"?
I should say my last encounter with biology was a GCSE some time in the 1990s.
> Is this just a sort of shorthand - assigning a kind of design _intention_ to Nature as a simpler way of expressing this?
Yes, and it's a fairly common, if misleading, shorthand. It's easy to communicate and so gets spread quickly and easily but it always takes careful reading to work out if the author is perpetuating a misconception around intelligent design or merely using an easily digestible metaphor. I suspect the author is doing the latter from a cursory reading, but I might be wrong.
The line is blurred here because it's describing human behavior, and we're certainly capable of intent. A little bit of it at a time, amortized over many generations and selected via evolution, but still intent.
By "stuff that became associated with success", do you mean something like "the mutation that causes the occasionally life saving trait X also causes blue noses, and that's why our noses are now blue"?
I'm no gene expert, but I don't think it normally works that way. There are a lot more genes involved and a lot more degrees of freedom, making the nose color and X independent. Or so I, as a non expert, think.
Having recently read "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" [1] by the brilliant primatologist Frans de Waal, the whole introductory paragraph reeks of the "humans only" dogma.
Even the link to the Wikipedia article directly contradicts the statement of humans being the only species to bury their dead.
How counter-intuitive it is: so many aspects of evolution we accept as continuum with shared phenotypes (and extended phenotypes) all the way through, yet when it comes to our intelligence and specialness, we forget all of this.
FWIW the author acknowledges in a footnote that some of the "human only" traits are contested.
I totally agree that anthropocentrism in a fallacy/trap that we can fall into in all sorts of domains of thought - metaphysics, ethics, behavioral/evolutionary economics or whatever its called, etc.
But, to paraphrase Marshall Sahlins, "'Animals are basically people' is a much healthier perspective than 'People are basically animals.'"[1]. Which is to say, I think we can let our biases slide in this case, because even though we're focusing on ourselves because of our misperceived 'specialness', we can still learn broader truths in spite of this because we aren't actually so special or apart from nature.
I hear what you are saying. But it is also a mistake to simply assume that there is nothing that is unique to human psychology. In particular, we need to explain why humans have been so remarkably successful, including at dominating other species.
For instance, in all other social mammals, as far as I know, the social group consists of only the group you directly belong to and are in immediate contact with, and this group is in competition with all other social groups of your species.
But in human foraging groups, you band is a member of a larger tribe of many bands that you cooperate with, even though the bands are in no immediate contact most of the time. Now think of all the behaviors and cognitive mechanisms required to make that happen.
Neat summary and contextualization of the topic! Seems simple on the surface, which is why a nice lead through is helpful.
Last week at the zoo I watched the Chimpanzee dynamics for a good half hour or so. Very extreme by comparison to us. Loud. Chasing. Urination.
I suspect that biologically there's some overlap between Tears in Humans - which Chimps don't seem to possess the capacity to produce - and Defecation as a communication mechanism that Humans have spent a lot of time evolving away from. Each can be quite expressive.
Is there anyone here that's an actual subject matter expert on this topic? I know 1) that I am not a expert on why people cry 2) I don't believe the author has more than a day's worth of googling more background on the subject than me 3) I suspect there are people that have devoted a whole lot more time than the author to the question of why humans cry.
I'm not trying to judge the author, I'm just selfish about and hate wasting my time. This had every hallmark of half-assed pseudo-intellectualism and I don't have a day of time to find out.
>I don't believe the author has more than a day's worth of googling more background on the subject than me
There's a certain irony in this accusation considering 30 seconds on his site led me to find out he's writing a book on the subject of social psychology. http://elephantinthebrain.com. The fact that he took the time out of his book writing to write this article probably means he's researched and thought a lot about the subject.
He may be a secondary/tertiary source on this matter, but that doesn't mean he has nothing insightful to say about it, or that people who read the article are wasting their time (not to say that the reverse isn't true; maybe he hasn't properly learned the topic, but it's wrong to assume he just wrote this article off the cuff).
The author is simplifying or possibly over-simplifying. About a third of The Secret of Our Success was devoted to how human social norms are different from those of our primate relatives and really the whole book is worth reading if you found the article interesting.
For some reason I just find his articles annoying..his tendency to ascribe a scientific or economic purpose/motive behind everything ..seems too much like positivism and eliminative materialism. Science and economics isn't the answer to everything.
Yeah the idea that these things can be explained simply by a purposeful guiding force like evolution is an attractive idea not unlike the belief in a higher power. What seems more likely is that many human traits and behaviors are highly complex evolutionary cruft — things accumulated over millions of years that fall into a few categories:
1) evolved "recently" to create a specific advantage for a human population (the author's favored explanation for crying)
2) provided an advantage for a distant ancestral species and stuck around long past the context in which they were advantageous (the human appendix)
3) random interaction between different traits or behaviors initially evolved from 1&2
4) random evolved trait that happened to be part of an evolutionarily successful population (Epicanthic fold)
5) random interaction between evolved traits or behaviors and a novel environment to produce novel behavior (over-eating and obesity caused by an evolutionary preference for high-caloric foods and their now-widespread availability)
I tend to not like the speculative aspects of evopsych like the ones in this post because they don't really account for the amount of randomness, complex interaction, and vestigial weirdness that seems to result from evolution.
I also find his articles annoying but I have no problem with ascribing a scientific or economic purpose/motive behind everything.
The problem is that the explanation has to be solid, based in evidence and experiments. This article is a well written rambling, or to be more clear just an opinion.
For example in:
> We're also the only creatures who sing from the ground, sing and dance together, bury our dead, point declaratively, enjoy spicy foods, blush, and faint [1] (not to mention all of our weird sexual practices).
> [1] human-unique traits. Some of these are contested. [...] And I'm sure there are other examples of similar behaviors enacted by non-human animals. But the basic point stands: We do a lot of things that, if not singularly unique, are nevertheless extremely rare.
He cherrypicks a few behaviors and say that they make us unique, and when there is contradicting evidence he just ignore it. Whales can sing, wolves howl (is that similar enough?) and just ignore birds because they are not intelligent enough. Bonobos have a lot of weird sexual practices that are similar to the human one, and other animals have even weirder sexual practices that are unimaginable in humans. And the list of exceptions go on ...
> See, that's just the kind of bullshit sexism that discredits evo-psych. Your "evolutionary histories" always seem tuned to produce 1950's gender roles.
I'm toying with the idea that tears are the direct result of excess CSF pressure (i.e. a way to vent that), having observed someone with that condition who tears very easily. Just maybe. This would presumably require that the lacrimal fossa be connected to the inside of the skull, which is certainly possible. Humans, the only upright animal, have unique fluid pressure problems within the skull (except for giraffes - maybe they cry, and nobody's noticed) so crying being unique to humans wouldn't be too surprising. One tiny bit of evidence, a study showing valproic acid ratios (in those taking the drug) are about the same in both CSF fluid and tears:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6799283
Of course, crying being a signaling mechanism is another explanation. Maybe a better one.
The only other connection I can make is that migraines are closely correlated with dry eyes (and emotion can trigger migraines.) So people with migraines are sometimes advised to use eyedrops to reduce migraine incidence these days. Lacrimation is also a migraine symptom. If your brain is very active due to emotion, maybe tears help to reduce the chances that migraines result? (Or returning to the first hypothesis, maybe CSF pressure is elevated during migraines.)
Not a disproof, but chimps are more socially sacrificing than this article indicates, they will find crippled chimps for long periods, as a group; IIRC not just relatives.
"I'm toying with the idea that tears are the direct result of excess CSF pressure (i.e. a way to vent that)," Don't, it's not. Why don't you thing 1) high CSF pressure is mood altering/predisposing to tear activity 2) high CSF may be the result of an underlying cause also express in lactrimal gland activity? Those are simpler explanations, and not false, like the lacrimal duct/CSF hypothesis. As for valproic acid, you are letting the tail wag the dog (the point of the article was to suggest diagnostic technique, and the drug was present in all tested fluids... the burden of proof would be on your to say why concentration in tears would not correlate well with serum levels, which also correlated as well with csf levels).
The only things I could find about migraines and dry eyes were positively correlated, but not strong, and not enough to be causative. Can you share more sources? Also, most source indicates IIH can be comorbid with migraines, but is unrelated, curious if you have sources to share on that, too.
How does this theory explain the act of crying in private?
The theory explains why someone would want not to cry in front of people (loss of prestige/dominance), but not why someone would want to cry alone, in private.
Why do we laugh or smile in private when we're watching something funny? Why do we say "Ow!" when we're hurt, or scream when we're startled? Why does our body posture change based on our mood, even when no one's around to watch?
Adding in an extra check that says "if (someone is watching) { ... do this signaling thing ... }" more costly than just doing it.
That's not how evolution works. If evolution builds a mechanism to make you respond to a certain stimulus in a certain way, then it's more work (and more unlikely) to then make that mechanism only act under certain circumstances. We wouldn't not cry in private unless there were additional fitness advantage to it.
I agree that science can't explain everything. But I think that for every individual case, you need to make a sincere attempt to come up with a scientific explanation and then fail, before you can decide it is a mystery.
Our expression of grief is probably a result of a mutation that altered the structure of our amygdala so that fear controls brain chemistry less than our primate ancestor. When an animal is in fear, chemical reactions desensitize and suppress brain activity involved in emotional expression to protect the self from being perceived as weak and dedicate brain energy to motor functions.
Looking at tears and the neurological development from genetics through adulthood would be a great way to understand what makes us human.
It seems to me that crying often produces a cognitive process. So I feel sad about something and feel I can't do anything about it and cry, and after a while I don't feel so sad and see the situation in a different perspective where I can go on living. Or something distressing happens, and I talk about it and cry some, and after a while I feel better.
This seems to be a different sort of situation than crying to get help with an immediate situation. I wonder if that sort of case evolved first, and then got modified and used for the cognitive processing one.
I have a two year old son. As you can imagine he cries a lot. Lately we have been applying some EQ lessons we've learned and have tried to teach him to be aware of how he feels when he cries. You'd be surprised he's actually pretty good.
He starts to cry and then says "I'm crying." We acknowledge that he is crying by saying something like "You seem sad." He generally stops crying at that point and we move on. Its like the signal was sent and received. He feels heard.
Interesting article, still a lot of unanswered questions and open areas for discussion...
Most of my life, I was pretty unemotional. I didn't cry watching movies or TV, and even personal matters never brought me to tears. At some point, just shy of 30 years old, everything changed. I was always empathetic, but, that went in to overdrive... Seeing someone else cry or watching a powerful moment on TV can trigger an instant welling of emotion.
Could tears be there for some kind of moderating effect on cellular action potentials? Tears are notoriously salty; "salty" has even become synonymous with bitterness, angst, or remorse. I think their production does seem to have a noticeable effect on cognition, but for all I know it's just a coincidence. Certainly they would extract sodium from the body to some degree, I just wonder how much of an effect that would have.
EDIT: here is a vaguely-relevant(?) study from 2014 about an infant presenting with inconsolable crying allegedly because of "an alteration of sodium channels inducing neuropathy in small-caliber fibers" (1)
EDIT 2: As for why this is something that happens from the eyes specifically, I wonder if it is for a particular local effect on ion channels in the frontal lobes.
There seems to be a very interesting book in the making by the same author and in a similar vein of this article. The website says it will be finished at the beginning of 2018:
[+] [-] jawon|9 years ago|reply
When one of my kids was going through a health crisis I did a heck of a lot of lone crying. Each time internal stress and anxiety would build, my guts would get all churned up, then it would reach the point where I would cry and the "symptoms" would all reduce dramatically before starting to build up again.
I was amazed at the time that crying had such a noticeable effect on physical symptoms. I thought I must be dumping something, adrenalin?, out my tear ducts.
I'm probably wrong, though it's not the kind of set up you can test in a lab.
[+] [-] tbabb|9 years ago|reply
It's a confusion of cause and effect (or post-hoc fallacy). "I cry because it makes me feel better" supposes that feeling better is the purpose of crying. But really it's the other way around: Crying is the purpose of feeling better. Crying is the thing with purpose, because it's an important and useful social signal. Overpowering urges to succumb to it, and feeling better after having done so, are evolution's way of coaxing our minds to do something that's useful to us, just like urges to eat or have sex, and feeling better after having done them.
[+] [-] antiroyalty|9 years ago|reply
"The phrase "having a good cry" suggests that crying can actually make you feel physically and emotionally better, which many people believe. Some scientists agree with this theory, asserting that chemicals build up in the body during times of elevated stress. These researchers believe that emotional crying is the body's way of ridding itself of these toxins and waste products.
In fact, one study collected both reflex tears and emotional tears (after peeling an onion and watching a sad movie, respectively). When scientists analyzed the content of the tears, they found each type was very different. Reflex tears are generally found to be about 98 percent water, whereas several chemicals are commonly present in emotional tears [Source: The Daily Journal. First is a protein called prolactin, which is also known to control breast milk production. Adrenocorticotropic hormones are also common and indicate high stress levels. The other chemical found in emotional tears is leucine-enkephalin, an endorphin that reduces pain and works to improve mood. Of course, many scientists point out that research in this area is very limited and should be further studied before any conclusion can be made."
Crying can, quite literally, act like a stress valve!
[+] [-] warfangle|9 years ago|reply
This entire thing is so anecdotal and from-personal-experience, it's not remotely interesting in its attempts to generalize.
[+] [-] mod|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hosh|9 years ago|reply
It also sucks when you have a lot of sadness and grief bottled up -- yet for whatever reason, you can't cry.
I will also note: judgement is a subtle form of disgust.
Dr. Eckman has a great Atlas of Emotions: http://atlasofemotions.org/ which is a great starting point for differentiating between the culturally-universal emotions and the myriad of emotional states.
From my personal experience though, the best way to study and make sense of emotions is to experience them. Intellectualizing emotions without experiencing them is not sufficient.
[+] [-] solidsnack9000|9 years ago|reply
Many features of human physiology serve more than one function -- our eyebrow ridges protect our eyes from sun, dust, getting punched. I don't mean to reject your idea; but it doesn't seem to go very far towards explaining why tears are the way they are.
[+] [-] xelxebar|9 years ago|reply
There's a while lot more to crying than just the tears.
[+] [-] throwaway5752|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zimzam|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbctol|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbabb|9 years ago|reply
Frankly I'm astonished it has any credibility whatsoever, and if it does, it would severely dim my view of the entire field.
[+] [-] VLM|9 years ago|reply
So if a hunter gets hurt while hunting he could screw up the hunt for everyone by being hurt except for crying messes up his eye to eye stare down so he temporarily falls to the bottom of the dominance hierarchy allowing the overall tribe better luck hunting and more meat for everyone including himself, therefore cry in pain, in the long run equals more delicious meat. Stalking being more a carnivore behavior than herbivore I'd theorize crying is extremely manly and women carried the trait originally rather than directly benefiting by expressing the trait.
The vegan types can be very vociferous when presented with commentary about the biology of the human body appearing to have evolved to support meat eating, so be careful, its very politically incorrect to look into things like cross species carnivore eye contact behaviors or apparently evolutionary evidence of stalking and hunting biological technologies.
[+] [-] ygaf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dgreensp|9 years ago|reply
Babies often don't have tears for the first few months, but I'm not sure that's important. I do think they play a role on the playground, and a lot of the speculation about their effects in social situations sounds right. I don't have any ideas to contribute on why crying is accompanied by tears.
In any other species, wearing a signal that advertises, "I recently lost in a dominance challenge," is a strict liability — an invitation for others to pile on, opportunistically, and attack you while you're down (or else to mentally note that you're no longer a good, strong ally). There's no upside, therefore, to using anything other than a quick facial expression or flash of body language, to show your submission only to the aggressor.
That sounds like an overly harsh picture of non-humans to me! I'm pretty sure at least certain apes help their potentially-non-kin in distress. Humans aren't the only social mammals.
[+] [-] scandox|9 years ago|reply
I should say my last encounter with biology was a GCSE some time in the 1990s.
[+] [-] acomar|9 years ago|reply
Yes, and it's a fairly common, if misleading, shorthand. It's easy to communicate and so gets spread quickly and easily but it always takes careful reading to work out if the author is perpetuating a misconception around intelligent design or merely using an easily digestible metaphor. I suspect the author is doing the latter from a cursory reading, but I might be wrong.
[+] [-] yakult|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|9 years ago|reply
I'm no gene expert, but I don't think it normally works that way. There are a lot more genes involved and a lot more degrees of freedom, making the nose color and X independent. Or so I, as a non expert, think.
[+] [-] blackRust|9 years ago|reply
Even the link to the Wikipedia article directly contradicts the statement of humans being the only species to bury their dead.
How counter-intuitive it is: so many aspects of evolution we accept as continuum with shared phenotypes (and extended phenotypes) all the way through, yet when it comes to our intelligence and specialness, we forget all of this.
[1] http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Are-We-Smart-Enough-to-Know-...
[+] [-] MaxfordAndSons|9 years ago|reply
I totally agree that anthropocentrism in a fallacy/trap that we can fall into in all sorts of domains of thought - metaphysics, ethics, behavioral/evolutionary economics or whatever its called, etc.
But, to paraphrase Marshall Sahlins, "'Animals are basically people' is a much healthier perspective than 'People are basically animals.'"[1]. Which is to say, I think we can let our biases slide in this case, because even though we're focusing on ourselves because of our misperceived 'specialness', we can still learn broader truths in spite of this because we aren't actually so special or apart from nature.
[1] From intro to http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/titles/western-illusion-huma...
[+] [-] woodandsteel|9 years ago|reply
For instance, in all other social mammals, as far as I know, the social group consists of only the group you directly belong to and are in immediate contact with, and this group is in competition with all other social groups of your species.
But in human foraging groups, you band is a member of a larger tribe of many bands that you cooperate with, even though the bands are in no immediate contact most of the time. Now think of all the behaviors and cognitive mechanisms required to make that happen.
[+] [-] 6stringmerc|9 years ago|reply
Last week at the zoo I watched the Chimpanzee dynamics for a good half hour or so. Very extreme by comparison to us. Loud. Chasing. Urination.
I suspect that biologically there's some overlap between Tears in Humans - which Chimps don't seem to possess the capacity to produce - and Defecation as a communication mechanism that Humans have spent a lot of time evolving away from. Each can be quite expressive.
[+] [-] throwaway5752|9 years ago|reply
I'm not trying to judge the author, I'm just selfish about and hate wasting my time. This had every hallmark of half-assed pseudo-intellectualism and I don't have a day of time to find out.
[+] [-] rm999|9 years ago|reply
There's a certain irony in this accusation considering 30 seconds on his site led me to find out he's writing a book on the subject of social psychology. http://elephantinthebrain.com. The fact that he took the time out of his book writing to write this article probably means he's researched and thought a lot about the subject.
He may be a secondary/tertiary source on this matter, but that doesn't mean he has nothing insightful to say about it, or that people who read the article are wasting their time (not to say that the reverse isn't true; maybe he hasn't properly learned the topic, but it's wrong to assume he just wrote this article off the cuff).
[+] [-] gerbilly|9 years ago|reply
I'm not convinced that this is a unique to humans.
[+] [-] Symmetry|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abstractbeliefs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] applesapl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abvdasker|9 years ago|reply
1) evolved "recently" to create a specific advantage for a human population (the author's favored explanation for crying)
2) provided an advantage for a distant ancestral species and stuck around long past the context in which they were advantageous (the human appendix)
3) random interaction between different traits or behaviors initially evolved from 1&2
4) random evolved trait that happened to be part of an evolutionarily successful population (Epicanthic fold)
5) random interaction between evolved traits or behaviors and a novel environment to produce novel behavior (over-eating and obesity caused by an evolutionary preference for high-caloric foods and their now-widespread availability)
I tend to not like the speculative aspects of evopsych like the ones in this post because they don't really account for the amount of randomness, complex interaction, and vestigial weirdness that seems to result from evolution.
[+] [-] gus_massa|9 years ago|reply
The problem is that the explanation has to be solid, based in evidence and experiments. This article is a well written rambling, or to be more clear just an opinion.
For example in:
> We're also the only creatures who sing from the ground, sing and dance together, bury our dead, point declaratively, enjoy spicy foods, blush, and faint [1] (not to mention all of our weird sexual practices).
> [1] human-unique traits. Some of these are contested. [...] And I'm sure there are other examples of similar behaviors enacted by non-human animals. But the basic point stands: We do a lot of things that, if not singularly unique, are nevertheless extremely rare.
He cherrypicks a few behaviors and say that they make us unique, and when there is contradicting evidence he just ignore it. Whales can sing, wolves howl (is that similar enough?) and just ignore birds because they are not intelligent enough. Bonobos have a lot of weird sexual practices that are similar to the human one, and other animals have even weirder sexual practices that are unimaginable in humans. And the list of exceptions go on ...
It's similar to: from https://xkcd.com/775/
> See, that's just the kind of bullshit sexism that discredits evo-psych. Your "evolutionary histories" always seem tuned to produce 1950's gender roles.
[+] [-] dwaltrip|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nomentatus|9 years ago|reply
Of course, crying being a signaling mechanism is another explanation. Maybe a better one.
The only other connection I can make is that migraines are closely correlated with dry eyes (and emotion can trigger migraines.) So people with migraines are sometimes advised to use eyedrops to reduce migraine incidence these days. Lacrimation is also a migraine symptom. If your brain is very active due to emotion, maybe tears help to reduce the chances that migraines result? (Or returning to the first hypothesis, maybe CSF pressure is elevated during migraines.)
Not a disproof, but chimps are more socially sacrificing than this article indicates, they will find crippled chimps for long periods, as a group; IIRC not just relatives.
[+] [-] throwaway5752|9 years ago|reply
The only things I could find about migraines and dry eyes were positively correlated, but not strong, and not enough to be causative. Can you share more sources? Also, most source indicates IIH can be comorbid with migraines, but is unrelated, curious if you have sources to share on that, too.
[+] [-] wcdolphin|9 years ago|reply
The theory explains why someone would want not to cry in front of people (loss of prestige/dominance), but not why someone would want to cry alone, in private.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|9 years ago|reply
So one answer to your question is that you never know if someone will come by and look at your face in a few minutes.
[+] [-] erroneousfunk|9 years ago|reply
Adding in an extra check that says "if (someone is watching) { ... do this signaling thing ... }" more costly than just doing it.
[+] [-] Analemma_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodandsteel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] caublestone|9 years ago|reply
Looking at tears and the neurological development from genetics through adulthood would be a great way to understand what makes us human.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871162/#!po=29...
[+] [-] woodandsteel|9 years ago|reply
This seems to be a different sort of situation than crying to get help with an immediate situation. I wonder if that sort of case evolved first, and then got modified and used for the cognitive processing one.
[+] [-] waderyan|9 years ago|reply
He starts to cry and then says "I'm crying." We acknowledge that he is crying by saying something like "You seem sad." He generally stops crying at that point and we move on. Its like the signal was sent and received. He feels heard.
[+] [-] gfosco|9 years ago|reply
Most of my life, I was pretty unemotional. I didn't cry watching movies or TV, and even personal matters never brought me to tears. At some point, just shy of 30 years old, everything changed. I was always empathetic, but, that went in to overdrive... Seeing someone else cry or watching a powerful moment on TV can trigger an instant welling of emotion.
[+] [-] msluyter|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Analemma_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwringer|9 years ago|reply
EDIT: here is a vaguely-relevant(?) study from 2014 about an infant presenting with inconsolable crying allegedly because of "an alteration of sodium channels inducing neuropathy in small-caliber fibers" (1)
EDIT 2: As for why this is something that happens from the eyes specifically, I wonder if it is for a particular local effect on ion channels in the frontal lobes.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24468061
[+] [-] mannigfaltig|9 years ago|reply
http://elephantinthebrain.com/outline.html
[+] [-] urs2102|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] speby|9 years ago|reply