Tears of Happiness: Restoring Emotional Equilibrium
From wedding proposals and ceremonies to airport reunions and graduations, we’ve all experienced witnessing others’ tears of happiness or spilling a few of our own.
These positive moments are often filled with tears— a response generally associated with negative events, but here being triggered by joy or happiness.
In essence, crying is a good way for us to release negative things such as sadness, stress, and toxins. But what purpose does crying serve when we’re happy?
“I’m So Happy I Could Cry”
Basically, we restore our emotional balance by responding to positive experiences with negative emotions.
Tears of joy take place when individuals are overwhelmed with strong positive emotions– and a recent study published in Psychological Science found that individuals who maintain emotional equilibrium in this way recover better from those strong emotions.
The study, conducted by Dr. Oriana Aragon of Yale University, studied dimorphous expressions of positive emotions and how they effected emotional equilibrium.
It consisted an observation of negative and aggressive responses to positive emotions (happy moments from movies, reunions with loved ones, etc.) and the participant’s emotional states following the exposure to the positive stimuli..
Conclusions were that the overwhelming feeling of positive emotions (such as joy) elicited aggressive responses (not physically aggressive, but vigorous and energetic), with the most frequent aggressive response being the production of tears.
This negative response is thought to be a general mechanism of expression that helps to regulate positive emotion, resulting in a bigger drop-off in positive emotion five minutes after exposure to the trigger stimuli. The negatives helped moderate the intense positives, helping recovery from the emotional highs and bringing the participants back to emotional equilibrium.
IT TOOK ME A LONG TIME, A LOT OF EXPERIMENTS, AND A LOT OF WORK, TO SAY: YES, PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY FEELING POSITIVE [EMOTIONS] BUT EXPRESSING NEGATIVE [RESPONSES], AND DO SO ACROSS A VARIETY OF SITUATIONS,” ARAGON SAID. “WE REALLY WANT EMOTIONAL HOMEOSTASIS. WE WANT A HAPPY, MIDDLE SPOT. EXTREME IS NOT GOOD. IT’S HARD ON OUR BODIES.
The reverse can also be true: strong negative emotions can also elicit positive expressions. For example: nervous laughter when confronted with uncomfortable situations.
A famous example of this is Stanley Milgram’s controversial experiment on obedience to authority figures (the “Shock Box”). While an astounding 65% of the participants obeyed and delivered the experiment’s final jolt of 450 volts, Milgram noted the subjects began to laugh nervously once they heard screams of pain coming from the unseen “learners” they were harming.
This suggests humor could be a defense mechanism we use to guard ourselves against overwhelming negative emotions– a way to cope with heightened emotions and restore our emotional balance.
What’s fascinating about these findings is that they propose possible explanations to common, inexplicable, and paradoxical emotional reactions that we don’t understand ourselves as they occur.
These findings are based on the belief that people have emotional “limits”. If our sadness or joy is reaching an unmanageable limit of intensity, our bodies therefore become psychologically (and consequently, physiologically) overwhelmed.
This limit triggers the unexpected, seemingly inexplicable emotion — like tears of happiness — to reach emotional equilibrium.
Interestingly enough, these unusual displays help with our internal self-regulation.
Understanding how individuals express and regulate emotions (even if it is unconsciously) is particularly important when considering treatment of physical and mental health.
What do you guys think? Let me know in the comment section below.
(Study co-authors: Margaret S. Clark, Rebecca L. Dyer and John A. Bargh of Yale University)
Aragón, O. R., Dyer, R. L., Bargh, J. A. & Clark, M. S. (2014). Dimorphous expressions of emotion: Evidence of concept in aggressive displays toward cute stimuli.
Aragon O, Bargh JA, Clark MS, Dyer RL. Why ‘I’m so happy I could cry’ makes sense. Forthcoming Psychological Science. 2014.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11227082/Why-do-we-cry-tears-of-joy.html
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