Emotional Rollercoaster: A Journey Through the Science of Feelings. Claudia Hammond

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СКАЧАТЬ but at work or in a laboratory you might end up feeling awkward or embarrassed.

      There is another possibility for the discrepancy between people’s own reports of feeling better after crying and the laboratory experiments. The mind doesn’t assign equal importance to the creation and storage of memories of different events. We all have biases that affect what we remember. It helps us to justify our crying behaviour if we only recall the times it made us feel better.

      the message of tears

      Randy Cornelius sat in a studio at his local radio station WSPK in Poughkeepsie, USA – the radio station promising to play ‘today’s best music’. He’s a psychology professor at Vassar College and was waiting to be connected to the gloomy cupboard of a studio where I was sitting at the BBC in London, waiting to interview him for a radio series. It took a while and I could hear various engineers from both the British and American ends come over the headphones. Then, another voice with an American accent, ‘Hello, hello, can anybody hear me?’ I wasn’t sure whether I’d reached the man himself or another engineer. ‘Are you Randy?’ I asked. ‘I sure am,’ he said, causing mirth at the British end, but not a flicker from the States, where it doesn’t have quite the same meaning. Once it was established that the link between the studios was working, we went on to have a serious discussion about crying.

      In contrast to Professor Frey, he believes that tears are all about communication; they let other people know that you’re upset, information which might ultimately benefit you. Crying could be a powerful way of telling another person that their ‘harmless’ teasing has in fact touched a nerve and that they should stop. It also signals to those around you that you need their sympathy or help.

      After Julia and her fiancé split up she was walking along the street sobbing uncontrollably when a stranger approached her offering help. Because she was crying so much she couldn’t answer and shook her head. Tears provide such a strong message that they can even elicit help from strangers. Cornelius believes the failure of the laboratory studies to demonstrate benefits from crying is due to the fact that during the experiments nobody receives any comfort from another, so they haven’t gained any help by crying and therefore don’t feel any happier afterwards.

      Think of the kinds of situation where you tend to cry. When Randy Cornelius asked people to do this the occasions most often cited were the death of a friend, the end of a relationship, watching a sad film or poignantly happy events like a wedding. Now think back to the last time you actually did cry. Here it was a slightly different story. Tears tended to follow arguments or rejection or feelings of loneliness or inadequacy. Cornelius believes helplessness might be the key reason we cry; we feel we can’t do anything to change the situation, so we cry. Or to put it another way, we can’t do anything more for ourselves, so we need other people’s help and it’s crying which signals the seriousness of our situation. Babies cry in order to get the attention and help they need. Perhaps adults are doing the same.

      the quintet of the astonished

      In the second exhibition room at the National Gallery in London there are three cool cream benches, lined up one behind the other. We sit and watch in silence, apart from the inevitable occasional cough. On the wall in front of us there’s a life-size photograph of five people standing in two rows – a man and a woman at the front, and three men behind them. Although they are close together they don’t look at each other. Three of the people are staring at the same place in the middle distance. The woman has her arms crossed in front of her chest, one hand on top of the other. Slowly her left fist clenches tightly. This isn’t a photograph after all. The people are moving, very slowly. The woman looks angry, yet despairing. Who is she gazing at? She opens her mouth and her shoulders rise. She is trying to control her emotions but still looks tortured with distress. What terrible thing could she be watching? Has she just seen the man who killed her child? Behind her shoulder, a man has his eyes closed while he smiles in beatific joy. His face is full of contentment, a sublime, holy contentment. The man at the front screws up his face in misery. Is he calling out? His hand moves up in front of his chest. He is distraught. Is he the husband of the distressed woman? He doesn’t even glance at her; he seems to be in his own world of agony. Another man has his hand on the woman’s shoulder, but despite her distress he is almost smiling. He looks proudly happy. He could be watching his child playing a musical instrument. How could he be so happy when two of the others are so distressed? The woman’s bottom lip starts to jut out in anger. Her hands are clasped together so tightly that the veins on her forearms stand out making dark shadows down her wrists. The tortured man continues to cry out. The man next to him puts his hand on his shoulder but takes no notice of his distress, continuing to stare into the distance. The moving photograph is in a frame and is lit like an old master. Light falls on the faces and there are dark shadows in the folds of their clothing. However, this isn’t an old master. It’s an artwork by Bill Viola called The Quintet of the Astonished.

      It takes fifteen minutes for the emotions to play themselves out on the screen in slow motion. It’s uncomfortable to watch, but not because two of the people are so distressed. We know they are actors playing a part for the artist to film. The reason the film is discomforting is that you yearn for them to comfort each other. The man in religious ecstasy is so close behind the woman that at some points it’s almost as though he’s inhaling the smell of her hair and smiling in appreciation. They stand so close together that they are touching, but they never interact or even make eye contact. The man who is enjoying himself turns towards the distraught woman and puts his hand on her shoulder, but while you long for him to look into her eyes and show her that he’s there for her, he continues to smile instead. You find yourself wishing that if no one else is going to help the two tortured people, they could at least turn to each other and suffer together, but they are destined to suffer alone. The fact that it is so painful to watch these people standing so close and yet ignoring each other’s emotions shows us something fundamental about emotions – that they are an exceptionally strong form of communication. Crying in the presence of another is so powerful that it is unbearable to watch if that display of emotion is ignored.

      If the purpose of tears is to communicate your sadness so that others will help, there is just one problem: people often cry on their own and report feeling better afterwards even though they have received no comfort from others. Moreover people often deliberately seek privacy if they want to cry. It has been suggested that even if you cry alone, you’re using yourself as an audience. You might give yourself comfort by sympathising with yourself, agreeing that you have the right to feel unhappy about your situation in the same way that a friend would.

      It is possible that the opposing theories of Professor Frey and Randy Cornelius are in fact compatible. Perhaps we gain some relief from expelling the toxic by-products of stress in addition to communicating our distress and receiving comfort from others.

      If crying can be beneficial, this raises the question of whether never crying, like the Professor of Tears himself, could be harmful. In the Western world there has long been an idea that if you suppress your tears you will do yourself physical damage. Back in 1847 Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote in the poem ‘The Princess’,

      Home they brought the warrior dead;

      She nor swooned nor uttered cry. All her maids, watching said, ‘She must weep or she will die.’

      It has been suggested that suppressing the emotions could increase a person’s chances of developing cancer, heart disease or high blood pressure. Related studies tend to focus on emotions in general and often anger in particular, rather than crying. However, in one study people were instructed to watch films while suppressing their tears and laughter. This was found to increase heart rate, so in theory if this behaviour pattern was repeated over many years a person’s health could be affected. Nevertheless, you are unlikely to be in situations where you are suppressing tears many times every day, so СКАЧАТЬ