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Feb 4, 2009 11:28 pm US/Central
Good Question: Is It Alright To Cry?
(WCCO)
Rosie Grier once sang, "It's alright to cry ... It might make you feel better." But is that really the case? Can it really be good for you to cry?
As it turns out, each tear tells a different story.
We all have different triggers -- sad movies, a touching moment, a freshly peeled onion -- but some are more likely to admit to crying than others. Some call it cathartic; others avoid outward displays of emotion at any cost.
According to Dr. Bill Frey, a neurologist at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, there is a therapeutic aspect to having a good cry: "People feel better after crying."
Frey is the first person to research and publish studies about tears and crying.
"We have shown people sad movies and gotten them to cry and actually collected their tears into test tubes," he said.
He says 85 percent of women say they feel better after crying, as do 73 percent of men. But that leaves a good chunk of unsatisfied criers.
"Nobody really knows why it is that in some crying episodes people feel better and in some they don't," said Frey. "I've proposed that people feel better because they may be removing in their tears chemicals that build up during stress -- literally crying it out."
Frey has isolated different proteins in different types of tears: "Something unique is happening when we cry emotional tears, that is (to say) emotional tears are different than other kinds of tears."
The emotional tears contain way more stress proteins than the tears we cry when we cut an onion or stand in the cold.
Frey also said the disparity between genders is proven by science: "It is true women cry more often than men. We were the first to show that women cry four times as often than men. ... Part of that is maybe societal conditioning against men crying, but part of it is that the tear glands of men and women are anatomically different."
So what about crying in public? Researchers found some good and bad about it. Seventy percent of criers say they get sympathetic reactions, but that leaves 30 percent of us who just feel embarrassed.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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