Lauren M. Bylsma, PhD
Lauren M. Bylsma, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and psychology at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She has conducted numerous studies on how crying affects our health.
When a friend of mine started to cry a few weeks ago, I found myself wondering what I should do—comfort her and urge her to cry it out…or distract her and encourage her to just get over it. Common lore is that it’s good for us to cry when we need to—and that’s also the conclusion of researchers at University of South Florida in a study entitled When Is Crying Cathartic?
The study was published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology in 2008. I spoke with doctoral student of clinical psychology Lauren M. Bylsma, who helped analyze the findings. The researchers evaluated data on more than 5,000 male and female volunteers from 35 countries and reviewed how they felt after their last crying experience.
Bylsma’s focus was on when and under what circumstances crying became cathartic—that is, where the subject’s mood and physical well-being improved after crying. The fact that the study is international is important because it “makes the findings generalizable to different cultures,” says Bylsma. For example, people from America and Italy cry more frequently than those in China or Ghana.
The participants identified who or what was responsible for each crying episode and also provided details about who (family, friends, strangers) was present during the crying episode and described their reaction. Bylsma explained that “because so little is known about crying, we also looked into what was the response of others nearby to the crier and what caused the crying to stop.”
Here’s what Bylsma learned from her analyses of the post-crying information…
Why we cry and what happens physiologically when we cry remains something of a mystery to scientists. One theory says that crying is essentially a distress signal for help (i.e. a baby crying for food), while another sees crying as a way to reduce arousal after distress. A recent study in Emotion says we cry for both reasons. When 60 female subjects were monitored while watching a poignant movie, those who cried showed a rise in heart rate upon crying (arousal)…which then decreased as they continued to cry, as did their respiration rates (soothing).
One challenge in the study of crying is that “self-reports of crying episodes are generally retrospective,” points out Bylsma. Therefore, events that transpired afterward may affect that recollection and how a person feels about it. New research underway uses hand-held Palm Pilot computers so subjects can record crying episodes and emotions in real time.
Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all advice on crying, but here are some of the takeaways from the research for those who want to make their cry a “good” one…