In common parlance, allowing yourself to have a “good cry” about something is usually associated with feelings of being freed or released from burden or stress.
Yet there’s surprisingly little scientific research on the matter, leaving the question of whether there are actually emotional benefits to a nice sob session.
Now, in a study published in the journal Collabra: Psychology, Karl Landsteiner University psychology professor Stefan Sieger and his colleagues tried to establish a more scientifically rigorous assessment of the effects of “emotional crying.”
In an experiment, they invited 106 adult participants from Austria and Germany to track and self-report their emotional states 15, 30, and 60 minutes after a “crying episode was reported,” as well as their end-of-day emotional state, over a four-week period. (Just over 70 percent of participants were women, while 25 percent self-reported were men and around four percent reported as neither.)
“Crying is a basic human behavior,” Stieger told PsyPost. “I was astonished that very little research has been done on crying in field-like settings.”
The researchers found that women cried almost twice as frequently a month than men, at just shy of 5.8 crying episodes over the month-long study, compared to just 2.6 for the men. They also found that “women’s crying episodes lasted substantially longer than men’s,” lasting 7.7 minutes on average, while the men wrapped up in just 3.9 minutes.
The overarching takeaway of the study was that the benefits of crying greatly depended on the reason for why the participants were crying in the first place — which also varied depending on gender. For instance, men were “more likely to cry in response to impotence/helplessness and media,” such as a sad movie, while women were “more likely than men to cry in response to loneliness.”
Almost 87 percent of participants cried at least once over the four-week period, with the most common reason being media consumption.
Despite the abundance of tears, the scientists found no credible evidence that the crying episodes provided any immediate relief — which surprised Stieger, he told PsyPost.
In the case of crying because of loneliness or feeling overwhelmed, users self-reported worsening and lingering emotional states. However, in the case of tears over media eventually triggered a drop in negative emotions, suggesting having a “good cry” over a sad movie may actually be helpful.
While it’s a fascinating glimpse into the reasons and potential benefits of why we cry, there are some significant limitations to the study. Its sample size was small, and it relied on self-reported data, which could be subjective or swayed by the inability to accurately reflect one’s own emotional state in a smartphone app.
Then there are the many other times the participants may have experienced a strong emotion without actually crying.
“Although our design had several advantages, we were unable to compare the effects of crying versus non-crying after experiencing a similarly strong emotional reaction,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “It is therefore difficult to discern the extent to which our results reflect the effects of crying specifically, as opposed to the effects of having an emotional reaction more generally.”
The researchers also noted that “crying may not elicit a relieving effect until days later,” which could affect the outcome of their study.
“Future research would benefit from assessing affect after crying for longer periods (e.g., several hours and days),” the paper reads.
While Stieger told PsyPost that “no further studies about this topic are currently planned,” he said that his team’s approach could be applied to other studies as well in a a broader effort to “analyze human behavior in their everyday life.”
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