What's the function of tears, even the crocodile ones?
Why only people cry tears? Why animals don't? What quality makes us cry? There are tears of joy, grief, melancholy, sadness. They even are different in their chemical composition. Do they "evolve", in a lifetime? Do we have emotions not to be found in animals?
Comments (12)
I think that it is a way in which emotions are expressed cathartically, like laughter. Children cry so much but people usually cry less when they adults and how much they cry varies from person to person. I wonder how much is about social learning and even the gain from crying from sadness being communicated to others in this way..Also, we could question whether men cry less, or i If there is any intrinsic difference between the pattern of crying it could point to the role of biology. Perhaps testosterone suppresses tears and turns tears to anger. However, it may partly be about stereotypes and how women feel more able to cry openly while men are encouraged to hide their emotions.
That makes so much sense and you seem to know why. Can you expand and elaborate it so that we have a coherent theory for why we cry when we're down in the dumps?
Too bad. I wanna start a thread on it but let this one run it's course. If I can remember to that is. Until then :mask:
Could that be the reason we cry at funerals? Or is it just smoke of the crematory exhaust pipes, blowing the remnants of granny in our eyes?
Btw, if it didn't go without saying, and I suppose it didn't,
I.e. "smoke getting in your eyes" used to be a euphemism.
You're right if the issue is only about why we cry but there's something much broader that I want to explore. It's old news as far as I can tell but still I haven't come across a thread specific to the matter that I want to examine.
The smoke theory is on the wiki page for "crying", not "tears"
Appropiate emoticon! :cry: