Does crying help?

The other day I was struggling with a particularly difficult editing assignment, and when I took a break, I said to a friend that it was so frustrating it made me want to cry. He responded that crying seldom helped anything, with which I disagreed; sometimes I find crying to be therapeutic. “Well, if you must,” he said. In the end I didn’t cry; I grabbed a few munchies and went back to the assignment.

But if only this press release from the Association for Psychological Science had come out a few days earlier, I would have had some research to back me up. Not everyone feels better after crying, but a lot of people do. It’s a short release, and part of it is about the difficulties of studying crying in the lab, which I can certainly believe are considerable. However, it also covers some recent research on crying incidents that happened outside the lab and were later described to researchers. Out of the 3,000 incidents they looked at, most people did report feeling better after crying, although one-third said that they didn’t notice any improvement, and one-tenth reported feeling worse. (The work is described in Is Crying Beneficial?, by Jonathan Rottenberg, Lauren M. Bylsma, and Ad J.J.M. Vingerhoets, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(6), 400–404, 2008.)

So what’s the difference? It’s probably a long complicated story. However, what we know so far includes the fact that of the crying episodes reported, the people who received some emotional support were the most likely to feel better. On the other hand, people who are alexithymic (less able to name their emotional states) tend to feel worse after crying, and those with anxiety or other mood disorders tend not to feel better after crying. I expect there are a host of other variables, like personal history, how often you cry and how comfortable you are with it, who else is around and how they’re feeling. In my own case the other day, perhaps I was unconsciously weighing the variables: getting the assignment done was the thing most likely to bring relief, in those particular circumstances, so I buckled back down to it.

To tie this into the emotion and music thread, I’ve got a few CDs that I listen to only when I’m all by myself and not busy with anything that requires concentration, so they can work their full therapeutic magic. Every now and then, for example, I need to put on U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind and just let go and cry. Some of the lyrics are emotionally intense, particularly in the song Kite, which is about the death of a parent and which I first heard about six months after my mother died. But the album ends with a gentle, hopeful ballad, and by the end of that song I feel calm and peaceful. For however much I paid for that CD, it’s got to be the cheapest form of therapy.