Does crying actually make you feel better? New psychology research shows it depends on a key factor

A recent study published in Collabra: Psychology has found that the emotional benefits of crying depend heavily on the reasons behind the tears. While people often assume that a good cry provides immediate emotional relief, the research suggests that shedding tears does not universally improve a person’s mood. The effects of crying are relatively short-lived and vary based on whether the tears were triggered by personal distress, media, or moments of harmony.

Scientists conducted the new study to better understand how crying affects adults in their natural, everyday environments. In the past, scientists have mostly relied on laboratory experiments or surveys that ask participants to recall past events. These traditional methods can create problems because people might hold back tears in a lab setting or struggle to accurately remember exactly how they felt days or weeks later.

“Crying is a basic human behavior. I was astonished that very little research has been done on crying in field-like settings,” said study author Stefan Stieger, a professor and the head of the Department Psychological Methodology at Karl Landsteiner University.

The scientists wanted to track emotions as they unfolded in real time. They sought to measure exactly how long it takes for a person’s mood to change after crying. They also aimed to see if factors like the intensity of the tears or the specific trigger for the crying changed the emotional outcome.

To explore these questions, the scientists observed 106 adults over a period of four weeks. The participants were primarily women from Austria and Germany with an average age of about 29. They installed a customized tracking application on their personal smartphones to log their experiences.

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Whenever participants cried, they were instructed to immediately log the event in the app. They recorded the specific trigger, how intensely they cried, how many minutes the crying lasted, and their current levels of positive and negative emotions. The app then automatically prompted them to report their emotional state again 15, 30, and 60 minutes later.

To ensure they did not miss any tears, the researchers also asked participants to complete an end-of-day survey. This daily survey captured any crying episodes the person might have forgotten to log earlier. It also measured their overall emotional state for the day, which allowed the scientists to establish a baseline of how each person usually felt on days without any tears.

The scientists found that emotional crying is a very common human behavior. Nearly 87 percent of the participants cried at least once, averaging about five crying episodes over the four-week period. In total, participants reported 315 immediate crying events and an additional 300 previously forgotten events in their evening surveys.

Women tended to cry more often than men. The women in the study averaged nearly six crying episodes over the month, while men averaged just under three. Women also cried for longer periods and with greater intensity than the male participants.

The reasons for crying varied between men and women. Women were more likely to cry because of loneliness or personal disputes with loved ones. Men tended to cry in response to feelings of helplessness or in reaction to media, such as watching a sad movie.

Across the entire group, the most frequent cause of crying was media consumption. Tears triggered by feeling overwhelmed or lonely were the most intense and lasted the longest. These specific episodes averaged between 11 and 13 minutes each.

When looking at emotional outcomes, the scientists found no overall evidence that crying automatically provides immediate relief, which Stieger said came as a surprise.

The emotional aftermath depended almost entirely on the specific trigger for the tears. Crying in response to personal struggles, such as loneliness or feeling overwhelmed, led to a sharp drop in positive emotions and a strong increase in negative emotions.

These negative feelings lingered for quite a while. For individuals who cried from feeling overwhelmed, their positive emotions remained significantly lower than normal a full hour later. These self-focused triggers also dragged down the person’s overall mood for the rest of the day, though their emotions returned to normal by the following morning.

Tears shed for other reasons showed very different patterns. Crying over media content caused an initial drop in both positive and negative emotions. Over the next hour, negative emotions continued to decrease, suggesting that crying at a movie might eventually help soothe a person.

Tears of harmony, such as crying when someone does something kind, did not immediately change a person’s emotional state. About 15 minutes later, participants experienced a strong drop in negative emotions. Finally, crying from a sense of helplessness caused a quick drop in positive emotions, but the participants recovered to their normal emotional baseline within 15 minutes.

While the study provides detailed insights into human emotion, there are potential misinterpretations and limitations to keep in mind. Because the study relied entirely on self-reporting, participants might have inaccurately judged their own emotions. They might also have still forgotten to report some short or minor crying episodes.

The study design also did not allow the scientists to compare crying to experiencing a similar strong emotion without shedding tears. Because of this, it is hard to know if the observed mood changes were caused specifically by the act of crying or simply by the intense emotional event itself.

“No further studies about this topic are currently planned,” Stieger said. “But we will use the assessment procedure, i.e., multiple measurements per day over a certain amount of days (experience sampling method) using smartphones, for our further studies because this method is very promising if we want to analyze human behavior in their everyday life (i.e., has high ecological validity).”

The study, “Effects of Crying on Affect: An Event-based Experience Sampling Study of Adult Emotional Crying,” was authored by Stefan Stieger, Hannah Graf, and Sophie Biebl.