The Science of Tears: Why We React Differently to Genuine and Fake Crying
Have you been with someone who is crying and you immediately switch to the sympathetic mood, trying to comfort the person or trying to find solutions where you can, only to be with another person who is crying and you are triggered to respond differently because you sense the cry is fake? Well, same cry different response. WHY?
Why infants cry even without tears, we are forced to look for a solution to a problem we have no idea about or how to solve it. A baby might be crying because of a pain but because we do not even understand the reason for the cry less have a solution, we are immediately wired to rock them. Although this changes when they start to throw tantrums but you see, in adults that can communicate, this is different.
To explain this, a study titled "As tears go by: Baby tears trigger more brain activity than adult tears in nulliparous women" showed the different in brain activity of women who haven't had children to the tears of infants in comparison to adults. Using an Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), it was seen that there was a was a more active response of the image region of the brain when looking at crying infants than when they looked at crying adults. The images of crying children also activated the somatosensory cortex of the participants making them to feel the pain of the child which would make them want to find a solution to why the baby was crying.
From the study "A chemical signal in human female tears lowers aggression in males" publised in December 2023 showed that sniffing a person's tears can reduce aggression by almost half under certain condition. In the test, Men were tested for aggression using MRI while sniffing tears from women against fake tears. They were required to play an online game that was programmed to win and take money from them, while being told they were playing against a human. At the end of the game, they were furious but the aggression metrics for men who sniffed tears of the women were lowered by 43.7%, in comparison to men who sniffed fake tears. According to MRI, when participant sniffed real tears, the Insula send signals to the amygdala requesting it to be calm.
You see, another thing that tears does it broker trust. A study titled "Emotional Tears: An Honest Signal of Trustworthiness Increasing Prosocial Behavior?" published in 2019 showed that when people see tears running down the faces of other people, they tend to trust them more. They were asked to play games of where they were to trust their investments to farmers that either cried or didn't cry, and at the end of the game, participants gave their money to farmers that cried more as they trusted them more. They were also willing to give their money to people who cried in another game compared to people who didn't cry even when they knew they weren't going to get the money back.
I appears that I have mentioned a whole lot of good things about tears, but one thing I shouldn't forget to mention is that people can identify fake tears from a mile away, and they react to it differently. A study was done on people in the paper titled "The neural basis of authenticity recognition in laughter and crying" where electroencephalography (EEG) was used to look at participant and how their brain reacted to authentic and acted emotional expressions. The researcher showed that the brain sent a higher electric signal during real cry compared to fake cry. Also, there was a phony-meter signature in the brain for fake cry.
Understanding the science behind our reactions to tears can help us navigate our emotional responses more effectively. Whether comforting a crying friend, dealing with a child's tantrum, or assessing the sincerity of someone's emotions, being aware of these dynamics can guide our interactions and foster deeper connections with those around us.
Reference
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6201288/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17470919.2016.1247012
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.3002442
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1474704919872421
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8660868/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17470919.2016.1247012
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