THE PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY OF CRYING

Two conflicting views have emerged as to why people cry when they are sad. One suggests that crying serves homeostasis by facilitating recov ery; the other suggests that crying produces an aversive high-arousal state that motivates behavior aimed at ending the tears. To test hypot heses drawn from these views, we showed a short film known to elicit s adness to 150 women. During this film, 33 subjects spontaneously cried and 117 did not. Subjects who cried exhibited more expressive behavio r and reported feeling more sadness and pain than did subjects who did not cry. Crying also was associated with increases in somatic and aut onomic nervous system activity. The increases in autonomic activity co uld not be accounted for solely by the increases in somatic activity. Crying is thus associated with an aversive state, including negative e motion and a complex mixture of sympathetic, parasympathetic, and soma tic activation, and we speculate about the functional implications of these findings.