17 Facts About Crying & Tears You May Not Have Known

• Science

Everybody cries whether they’ll freely admit it to others or not. The reasons why we cry are multiple and varied. Scientists, psychologists, and anthropologists have studied the topic in depth, and here are some of their surprising findings.
1. People cry for three primary reasons. When most of us think about crying, Emotional tears come to mind. Those are the horrible sobbing tears or the merciful happy ones. But there are two other types of tears (both categorized as “lacrimal”), Basal and Reflex. The former type lubricates and cleans eyes to protect vision. The latter are associated with environmental irritations like onions (via the chemical irritant Syn-propanethial-S-oxide) or pollen. Lacrimal tears are essential to clean out debris so you can see better.
2. Crocodile tears qualify as an unofficial 4th form of crying. These fake tears are specific to people with excellent acting skills, of course. The term comes from the ancient Greek anecdote about crocodiles who fake-cry in order to deceive their prospective prey. Crocodiles do appear to produce tears, but this may be due to their third eyelid, which requires a great deal of lubrication.

3. Even when you’re not crying, your body generates 1-2 microliters worth of tears. You don’t notice most of this production as they are blinked away as basal tears. Some of the tears are even rerouted down your throat while your body operates on autopilot.
4. Your nose stops up when you cry because excess tears come out of your nose. Each one of your eyes can only hold about 7 microliters of tears, and a strong crying session causes serious overflow. Those extra tears flood the nasal passages, which creates a runny and/or stuffy nose.
5. A neurological condition called Pathological Laughing & Crying (PLC) can cause involuntary crying at inappropriate times. The condition can be caused by ALS, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, or a stroke.
6. In general, women cry more often than men, but the true difference may surprise you. The estimated number of times a woman emotionally cries is 50 times per year. Men do it on average of 10 times per year … although they tend to deny the act on many occasions.

7. Babies average about 1 to 3 hours of crying every day. The poor creatures possess no other means of communication, much to the chagrin of their parents. Babies cry for many reasons, including hunger, discomfort, fatigue, discomfort, fear, pain, loneliness, and genuine peril. Any baby who cries for more than 3 hours a day for 3 weeks (and for no reason at all) may have the dreaded colic.
8. Crying is different in many cultures. Although babies universally cry to satisfy their needs, each culture’s socialization processes lead to different ways of crying as an older child or adult.
9. Scientists believe that emotional crying is a unique human experience, but some people do believe that animals can emotionally cry. The case of Raju the crying elephant only bolstered those claims.
10. Scientists believe emotional tears may be an evolutionary adaptation. Tears can provoke empathy or aid from other human beings. They can foster a sense of unity among a group of people mourning the same loss. There’s also a theory that predators could have helped protect humans from predators.
11. “Good” crying really can help you feel better. Crying can be a means to catharsis because it helps you release tensions and come to new peace or resolutions about the reason behind the cry. Good cries are often associated with another person soothing the crier.
12. “Bad” crying can make you feel even worse. Crying can make people worse because of resulting headaches (from dehydration and tense muscles), dry eyes, and stuffy noses. These side effects outweigh cathartic benefits especially amongst chronically depressed criers who aren’t crying about one specific thing.
13. The reasons for women crying more often than men are largely biological. Women have 60% more prolactin in their bodies than men. Prolactin is a protein that affects the endocrine system, which may cause women to cry more often than men. Women also have smaller tear ducts than men, which means their tears more readily spill over and, thus, are more visible than men’s tears.
14. The size of the tear disparity between genders is often cultural. Women in wealthier Western cultures cry more frequently than women in other countries. Simply put, excessive emotional crying is a first-world problem of sorts.
15. Tear ducts can become blocked, causing complications. Blocked tear ducts can result from aging, injury, cyst, inflammation or a tumor. This can paradoxically cause excessive tearing and lead to infection of the affected eye.
16. The different types of tears look stunningly different under a microscope. A Smithsonian photographer illustrated how, for example, onion-induced tears are much more crystallized than “happy” tears.
17. A woman’s tears send a particular chemical signal to men. One of the things this signal does is it causes a dip in male sexual arousal, which is an involuntary yet interesting means of nonverbal communication between the sexes.