Sympathy Crying: Insights from Infrared Thermal Imaging on a Female Sample.

Stephanos Ioannou,Vasudevi Reddy,Samantha Terry,Marc Baker,Vittorio Gallese,Paul Morris,Alessio Avenanti

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0162749

Abstract

Sympathy crying is an odd and complex mixture of physiological and emotional phenomena. Standard psychophysiological theories of emotion cannot attribute crying to a single subdivision of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and disagreement exists regarding the emotional origin of sympathy crying. The current experiment examines sympathy crying using functional thermal infrared imaging (FTII), a novel contactless measure of ANS activity. To induce crying female participants were given the choice to decide which film they wanted to cry to. Compared to baseline, temperature started increasing on the forehead, the peri-orbital region, the cheeks and the chin before crying and reached even higher temperatures during crying. The maxillary area showed the opposite pattern and a gradual temperature decrease was observed compared to baseline as a result of emotional sweating. The results suggest that tears of sympathy are part of a complex autonomic interaction between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems, with the latter preceding the former. The emotional origin of the phenomenon seems to derive from subjective internal factors that relate to one’s personal experiences and attributes with tears arising in the form of catharses or as part of shared sadness.

Highlights

Crying constitutes an important element of human emotional expression [1] and like blushing is unique to homo sapiens [2]
This was performed in order to eliminate differences in the size of the regions of interest selected by each independent rater (Table 1)
Previous and current research findings suggest that a blend of autonomic engagement occurs during crying

Summary

Introduction

Crying constitutes an important element of human emotional expression [1] and like blushing is unique to homo sapiens [2]. According to [3], various crying displays such as watery eyes, sobbing and weeping are part of an emotional intensity scale that is influenced by culture as well as individual trait variations. Functional distinctions in tear shedding were noted by [4] who separated crying in displays of suffering from “tender feelings”. Tears are seen and expressed in a variety of emotional contexts. Crying is first observed in the context of a simple response to pain or separation. During ontogeny, crying develops as a response to the distress of others in the form of sympathy [5,6,7,8]

Results

Discussion

Conclusion