Tears caused by a speck of dust in the eye are not the same as tears of emotion. In the first case, they only produce a wet sensation on the cheek; in the second, they remove the entrails.
Healthy tears and bitter tears
In general, tears of emotion are usually healthy, since they contain leucine encephalin, a hormone that acts on pain, as well as the molecules and toxins of stress, which the body evacuates when crying. Also, the nervous message caused by tears causes the production of natural analgesics (pain suppressors). A study has calculated that crying reduces sadness or anger by approximately 40%.
However, not all tears of emotion relieve. According to a study of 200 women in the Netherlands, people who suffer from depression or anxiety feel even worse after crying.
Tears and love
Poems and love novels can also make you cry, as weddings or the kiss of a tough cowboy when he finally lets you see his most sensitive side at the end of a film.
However, the tears of a woman also have the peculiarity of intimidating a man. It is scientifically proven. After confronting a group of men and women crying, the researchers showed them sexually arousing images and found that these men were less stimulated than the rest who had not been subjected to tears. The data is explained by the fact that women's tears cause a decrease in testosterone levels in men.
This explains many things; a girlfriend madly in love who starts crying in the arms of a man will provoke the latter tenderness, of course, and desire to protect and comfort her, without a doubt.
The origin of tears
Nobody really knows why we cry, but an interesting hypothesis, which was already advanced by the Dutch psychologist Ad Vingerhoets, is that when we blot our eyes, the tears inform us that temporarily we are helpless and, therefore, vulnerable.
They indicate that we cannot do any harm.
In this way, the tears manage to eliminate the aggressiveness of others, since it does not serve them at all. And as we often observe, they generate an uncomfortable and impotent feeling in the environment.
Tears are also one of the means of nonverbal communication that man uses when he is not in a position to speak, especially when he is a child or an elder.
The psychiatrist John Bowlby has stressed many times that tears play an extremely important role in developing the bond of a mother with her child. They favour the development of maternal love.
