Crying game: the uses and abuses of shedding a tear

It seems to be a contractual obligation for participants in reality TV shows to, following the dropping of a hat, weep until instructed to stop. The X Factor provides sobbing on a Wagnerian scale from Cheryl's shining eyes to the plaintive blubbing of contestants who "re-heally wa-aant this, Simon" to the tears of Cowell himself earlier this series.

But The X Factor isn't about hitting a note for the judges' benefit, it is about stimulating an emotional nerve in the viewer, thus provoking their tears. And if there is any chance at all for a participant to cry, they take it.

Forgotten or abandoned is the idea of quashing or concealing sadness or tears, a virtue long prized by stoics, yogis and comic book heroes.

Perhaps rushing through modern life affords restricted views of our emotional landscape, which might explain why Tokyo's Mitsui Garden Hotel Yotsuya offers "crying rooms" aimed at stressed-out young women. The rooms are stocked with tissues, eye masks and sentimental films.

But renting “crying rooms” to stressed-out young women invites the inference that men don’t cry. Indeed, male tears in the public sphere still make news – as did those of Cowell himself when he shed a tear after Josh Daniels’s rehearsal.

Men do cry

Despite the shock that the man himself could cry, studies show, unsurprisingly, that men do cry. The International Study on Adult Crying, carried out from 1996 to 2008, found that men do cry, though for shorter periods than women.

The study found 62 per cent of men reported their last crying episode lasted less than five minutes, compared with 37 per cent for women.

But what does crying do? It can be scientifically defined as the shedding of your tears in response to an emotional state; different from lacrimation, which is the non-emotional shedding of tears.

It doesn’t just dampen your face – it has a whole host of other effects; increased heart rate, sweating, slower breathing and a possible lump in your throat – the globus sensation. It all occurs as a result of your fight or flight system activating in response to tear-producing events.

So was the Roman poet Ovid correct in saying, "It is a relief to weep: grief is satisfied and carried off by tears"? In a study reported this year in the journal Motivation and Emotion, researchers investigated the experimental induction of crying in 66 male and female students (aged 19 to 33 years) by rating their moods before and immediately following exposure to an emotional film, as well as 20 and 90 minutes later.

They found that “after the initial deterioration of mood following crying . . . it takes some time for the mood, not just to recover, but also to increase above the levels that it had before the emotional event”.

Babies

Crying in adults is one thing, in children it’s quite another. The cry of a newborn prompts the secretion of the so-called “cuddle hormone” oxytocin in the mother, promoting responsiveness and mediating nurturing and a feeling of safety. New to the world, babies use crying more than just a means of emotional expression but as a form of communication.

Babies usually cry for less than three hours per day up to the age of three months, though some babies can cry for up to 12 hours per day from birth. According to consultant paediatrician Dr Sheila McKenzie, although troublesome crying can be distressing for parents, it’s often found that on admission to hospital crying improves.

"All paediatricians are either referred such babies because those in primary care have been unable to help them and their families, or the babies are brought to A&E by their parent(s) because they're at the end of their tether," McKenzie, who in 2013 while based at Scotland's Lawson Memorial Hospital, published a review for the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, told The Irish Times.

“So, many parents come thinking maybe there is something physically wrong [with their baby] and expect investigations. Paediatricians, wrongly in my view, often try to fulfil these expectations.

“As a young paediatrician I would admit the babies to hospital and was impressed that the crying stopped very quickly. Nurses would say to me ‘there’s nothing wrong with that baby’.

“This is what started my interest and I undertook the study quoted in the review. This showed that advice to reduce stimulation and thus arousal of the baby was helpful.”

Someone whose interest in tears extended beyond their emotional impact was the discoverer of penicillin, Sir Alexander Fleming. In 1922, while in his laboratory suffering from a cold, Fleming opted on one occasion not to blow his nose but to harvest a dollop of nasal mucus and add it to a Petri dish on which a colony of bacteria was growing (don't try this at home).

Tear fluid

The mucus killed the bugs. But Fleming also found that one drop of tear fluid dissolved the organisms in less than five seconds.

In his The Life of Sir Alexander Fleming (1959), André Maurois quotes one of Fleming's colleagues, who recalls: "For the next five weeks, my tears and his were our main supply for the experiment . . . We used to cut a small piece of lemon-peel and squeeze it into our eyes . . ."

They aspirated the fluid with a modified pipette, but in their search for larger volumes, laboratory attendants were recruited and paid three pence a time for undergoing the “ordeal by lemon”, and in due course the active agent was identified and named “lysozyme”.

With The X Factor final approaching, large volumes of lysozyme-enriched tears are expected to be shed. Has anyone got a tissue?