Researchers know little about what triggers crying

It took 24 hours for Sue Anderson to cry. It was a full day before she really understood her 21-year-old son, Chad, was dead.

And when the tears flowed — that's when Anderson began to grieve.

"The tears didn't start at the beginning. But when they came, they were unstoppable," recalled Anderson, whose son died in a car accident in 1991. "And I do believe for me, allowing myself to go to that place, to feel, was healthy."

Although crying is a natural human phenomenon, there aren't any solid theories about why people cry, why some people cry more than others and why women tend to cry more than men. In fact, there is little research on what is deemed a normal human behavior.

Anderson, 63, now works as a grief counselor for parents whose children have died. And while people deal with traumatic incidents in different ways, she believes crying is an important emotional outlet.

"Tears seem to help people wash away some of the pain," she said. "When they cry, they release some of the feelings they have inside of them. ... With grief, we want to get the emotions out as much as we can. And if crying is a way to do that, that's a great thing."

A biological function

Humans are the only animals that cry emotional tears.

"Other animals, mammals, will tear up when they're in pain or when they have something in their eye, but only humans weep," said Randy Cornelius, a psychology professor at New York's Vassar College.

Human babies as young as 24 hours can mimic the facial expressions of surprise and fear, he said. And they are born with the ability to signal their caretakers for help.

If crying leads to being picked up, fed or changed, then a baby knows it's a signal that works. But as an infant gets older, individual and cultural experiences contribute to whether emotional crying — out of happiness, sadness or anger — is appropriate, said Cornelius, who studies how crying and other emotional exchanges affect relationships.

Tears protect the eye's surface. Basal tears — which are always present in healthy eyes to help with vision clarity — are made up of mucus, water and fat. Reflex tears — triggered by irritation from peeling onions or heavy smoke — are composed mostly of water and come from the eye's main gland, the lacrimal gland.

Emotional tears also flow from the lacrimal gland, but there isn't a proven physiological reason for them, said Dr. Bryan Sires, associate professor and acting chair of ophthalmology at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

And like basal and reflex tears, emotional tears are involuntary.

"You don't think about it and make yourself cry. You're emotionally overwhelmed and the tears just come," said Sires. "You can control your emotions, which controls the tearing, but you can't have the emotion without the tearing. You can't voluntarily wish away the tearing."

Boys don't cry

William H. Frey II asked hundreds of people across the United States to keep "crying journals" in the early 1980s. He found boys and girls younger than 12 cried the same amount. But women 18 and older cried four times more than men — about 5.3 times a month, compared to 1.4 times.

"Something happens between the ages of 12 and 18 that teaches people whether they can cry," said Frey, who now directs Alzheimer's research at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, Minn.

Frey believes social pressures, combined with biology and hormones, create the difference between men and women.

The lacrimal glands of men and women are anatomically different, he said. The area of tear-producing cells in males is actually bigger than in women. And women have more prolactin than men, the hormone that controls fluid balance.

Cornelius, of Vassar College, helped conduct a study in the late 1990s of crying patterns in more than 3,500 men and women from 29 countries. Women cried more than men in every country but Nepal (where crying was equal), but the gaps varied country to country.

Women cried more than four times as much as men each month in Bulgaria, Spain and Switzerland. In Nigeria, women cried 1-1/2 times more than men, according to findings published in the book, "Adult Crying: A Biophysical Approach." The remaining countries fell somewhere in between. In the United States, women cried almost twice as much as men.

"Any one person is a confluence of biological factors that everyone shares and personality factors that are partly biological," said Cornelius. "Then there are other things that have to do with broad cultural things we've learned."

Certain groups in Indonesia, for instance, don't value intense emotions such as anger and sadness, and in Bali, people are not allowed to cry during the entire mourning period after a death, according to the book.

Crying for your health

Frey believes emotional crying alleviates stress by removing toxins that build up in the human body during difficult times.

In his work, he found emotional tears contain more proteins than other types of tears, and most people — 85 percent of women and 75 percent of men — say they feel better after crying.

"It seems likely there would be health benefits to crying because people feel better after crying and crying alleviates stress," he said

Although Frey cries the same amount as the average American man, he encourages people to let the tears fall.

"I'm not afraid to do it. I think it's a good thing to do," he said. "When you feel like crying, I think you should."

The majority of people say they cry alone, often because they're afraid of showing emotions to others, Cornelius said.

"There are situations when we feel very vulnerable and if we don't feel safe among other people, we're going to go and hide. We're like any other animal that is hurt," he said.

But even when people cry alone, he said, they are conveying something to themselves — perhaps the depth of their sadness, stress or frustration.

Anderson, the mother whose son died, said most of the crying she's seen as a grief counselor has been in reaction to deep feelings.

"Sometimes when people are grieving, their grief is so overwhelming that the thought of crying really frightens them. So they use their energy to push it away," said Anderson, who helped start Compassionate Friends, an Eastside support group for grieving parents.

"They can do that for a while, but it usually catches up with them — the more intense the grief, the more intense the tears."

Gina Kim: 206-464-2761 or gkim@seattletimes.com