Crying has several functions of expressing our emotions (joy, sadness, anger, etc.) and allows us to create bonds with other people. When we see someone crying, we try to reach out with warmth and support, but crying can also create the perception that people who cry are “weak” and cannot control their emotions.
To try to better understand what factors affect the perception of crying, researcher Monika Wróbel and her team developed research that analyzed data from 7,007 people who were between 18 and 19 years old. Everyone was presented with four random images showing the face of a person crying and another person not crying. Each photo had a brief description (positive, negative, or neutral) of the context of the photo. For example: “A person reuniting with a loved one they haven’t seen in years.” Subjects were then asked to evaluate each of the images.
Findings
They found little evidence that tears influence perceptions of competence. But the situational context does. Faces of people crying in positive (happy) and negative (pain, sadness) situations received the highest “appropriate” ratings compared to images of crying faces in neutral situations (entering a supermarket).
In other words: when crying was considered honest, competence scores increased, but when it was considered inappropriate or the reason for crying was not fully understood, competence scores decreased.
Wróbel explained in an interview with PsyPost: “People who cry can be perceived as lacking competence only under some specific conditions. For example, when a person is shedding tears in an emotionally neutral situation (for example, while doing laundry) and observers cannot tell what the reason for crying is, they perceive the tears as inappropriate and, as a result, the person crying as incompetent.”
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Which suggests that crying can increase perceptions of competence; crying is interpreted as authentic and congruent with the situation. When a person cries in a context that “should not” provoke crying, for example, going to the supermarket, the person may be considered unable to control their emotions, and, therefore, incompetent.
All of these analyzes reinforce that crying, like other emotional expressions, cannot be studied outside the context in which they occur. And at the same time they demonstrate how quick we humans are to make value judgments. As soon as we observe a person crying and we do not understand why it is happening, we conclude that it is “inappropriate” and we judge people as not very competent.
Reference: Wróbel, M., Wągrowska, J., Zickfeld, JH, & van de Ven, N. (2022). Tears do not influence competence in general, but only under specific circumstances: A systematic investigation across 41 countries. Emotion, 22(2), 292-304. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0001010
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