Emotional tears: What they are and how they work

Abstract

Although much is known about emotional tears from the perspectives of neurobiology and behavior, the production of emotional tears and the responses they elicit depend sensitively on a rich set of computations—one which has received little attention to date. This review article aims to close this gap. Emotional tearing occurs during negative events (e.g., injuries) and positive events (e.g., achievements). Episodes of tearing appear to be united by tearers' subjective imputation of negative or positive value to certain internal or external phenomena. Knowing the degree to which objects, organisms, events, and states of affairs enhance or diminish one's prospects—the value of things—is a pressing matter for humans and other organisms. Value information is produced for internal consumption, to be used by behavior-regulating mechanisms in the focal individual. But some evaluations are made available, in addition, to other people, through tearing and other forms of verbal and non-verbal communication. Tearing may function as an implicit plea for receivers (the tear targets) to minimize the costs imposed on the tearer by nature, by third-parties, or by the tear targets themselves—common when the tearer has lower formidability or wherewithal than tear targets do. In addition, tearing may exhort tear targets to infer and register which things the tearer values, positively or negatively. Here, we characterize tears, describe the game-theoretic logic of bargaining from a position of weakness, outline the computational systems that regulate the production of and responses to emotional tears, and review findings about emotional tearing that are relevant to the signaling hypothesis.