Speaking of Psychology · American Psychological Association

Why do we cry? With Lauren Bylsma, PhD

·26 min·2 clips

Women cry three to five times more than men across all cultures, but the exact reasons remain a mystery.

1. Speaking of Psychology features Dr. Lauren Bylsma of the University of Pittsburgh discussing the psychology and neurobiology of human crying. 2. Dr. Bylsma is a licensed clinical psychologist and associate professor of psychiatry and psychology who has studied crying for nearly two decades, as well as emotion regulation, depression, and cognitive behavioral therapy. 3. The episode asks why humans cry, whether 'having a good cry' actually helps, and what science can and cannot yet explain about tears. 4. Bylsma distinguishes three types of tears: basal (lubrication), reflexive (irritant response like onions), and emotional tears, which are the focus of her research and occur in response to intense positive or negative experiences. 5. Women cry three to five times more often than men across all cultures studied, driven by a combination of social norms discouraging male emotional expression and likely biological factors such as hormones and neurological differences that have not yet been fully identified. 6. A 2008 global survey of crying found striking cross-cultural similarity alongside subtle cultural differences, suggesting emotional crying is a broadly human phenomenon rather than a culturally specific one. 7. No laboratory studies have successfully induced tears of joy; positive crying typically requires highly personal events such as a wedding, birth, or Olympic victory, making it far harder to study than distress-induced crying. 8. To induce crying in the lab, researchers have used emotionally intense film clips, including a scene from the 1979 film The Champ in which a child mourns a death, but Bylsma notes this setting produces artificial results. 9. Almost everyone who cries in a lab setting reports feeling worse afterward, while most people who cry in daily life report feeling better — a stark discrepancy Bylsma attributes to the artificial, surveilled nature of laboratory conditions. 10. Supportive social context is the strongest predictor of feeling better after crying: people who cry around comforting others recover more reliably than those who cry alone, though some people who cry alone also report improvement. 11. One theoretical explanation for solo crying's benefit is that crying forces cognitive engagement with the source of distress — you cannot avoid thinking about what is upsetting you when you are actively crying about it. 12. No neuroimaging studies of human emotional crying have ever been conducted, which Bylsma calls a remarkable gap given how universal and frequent the behavior is. 13. The amygdala and the central autonomic network are likely involved based on analogy with emotion neuroscience and animal studies of distress vocalizations, but this is speculative without direct imaging data. 14. Crying in therapy is common for both patients and therapists; Bylsma's review of the literature found that therapist crying, when handled appropriately without diverting attention from the patient, is typically experienced positively by both parties. 15. Women average roughly two to three crying episodes per month; men average zero to one — but Bylsma emphasizes there is no pathological number, and frequency only becomes a concern if it impairs social or daily functioning. 16. Chronically suppressing tears is associated with negative outcomes in self-report research, particularly when people have no safe outlet to process emotions — a concern Bylsma says warrants seeking psychotherapy. 17. The episode moves through a series of focused questions from host Kim Mills with detailed, research-grounded answers from Bylsma, with minimal tangents and a clinical precision throughout. 18. The tone is informative and calm; Bylsma draws on both research and clinical experience, acknowledging limits of current evidence without hedging on well-established findings. 19. Listeners interested in emotion psychology, clinical mental health research, or simply the science behind a universal human experience will find this episode directly useful. 20. Listeners expecting philosophical or self-help framing, or detailed neuroscience, may find the emphasis on gaps in the research frustrating.

As heard by us

A careful look at why crying can help, especially when emotion meets attention and social support.

Crying is treated here as ordinary, bodily, and still oddly unresolved: a sunset, a skinned knee, a sad movie, even an onion can all set off tears, but the episode is more interested in what emotional crying may do once it starts.

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Why you'd press play

You want a calm answer to why crying happens, and when it actually helps.

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