Crying is usually associated with feelings of loss, sadness, disappointment or melancholy. Tears are used to externalize pain, frustration, or anxiety. Negative emotions, all of them. However, there are also situations in which we cry with joy, emotion, hope or relief. In them we are moved by positive and pleasant feelings.
How can such a contradiction be related to an inner state of fullness?In this article you will discover the response that various researches have given to the existence of this curious phenomenon.
- We cried when we received good news that we expected.
- When someone opens our hearts or when we have a surprise.
- There are many occasions when a happy event makes us react in this seemingly contradictory way.
However, crying is not the only external expression involved in such events, we may want to squeeze the cheeks of a child we think is very cute or bite (softly) the person we love, so too. Sometimes, in the face of extreme sadness, we unintentionally release a nervous smile or a laugh.
These are automatic reactions with no apparent logic, however, the association between positive and negative expressions (and vice versa) plays an important role.
Oriana Aragon, a psychologist at Yale University, has done a lot of research on this subject. Using the term “dimorphic expressions”, his studies analyze the presence of these manifestations incompatible with the person’s feeling.
These are not states in which positive and negative emotions (mixed expressions) coexist, are we talking about a purely positive valencia emotion adopted by a manifester?Negative?. The study presented positive stimuli to participants and analysed ways to react.
The results showed that people who used negative reactions to express themselves were able to more easily moderate the intensity of their emotions, that is, tears of joy are a way to restore balance to overflowing emotion, it is how a negative expression compensates for the intensity of positive emotion, reaching a balance.
The question is: why limit or compensate for the feeling of fullness?For, in the face of extreme joy, the person overflows with his emotions and, therefore, his ability to make decisions is overshadowed, restoring emotional balance is necessary to continue to function. Correct.
Tears of happiness are not only meant to maintain inner homeostasis; they are also an important form of communication. One study found that the answer we offer to a person who expresses joy by smiling or crying is very different. In the first case, we tend to join the celebration and share the emotion, to prolong the emotion of that person.
However, in the face of tears of joy, we tend to react in a way that helps the individual regulate and decrease the level of emotional intensity he feels, more or less directly we perceive his emotional exaltation and act according to the situation, contributing to his regulations.
Many of the unexplained behaviors that we humans have seem to make sense in light of these discoveries, when we feel a positive emotion (whatever it is) of extreme magnitude, we are led to react in the opposite way to restore previous levels.
Thus, when we see our partner, we can feel such a flood of love, hope and gratitude that we feel the need to bite their arm, shoulder or cheek, in this way we could compensate, in some way, for this emotional deluge.
So when you react aggressively or sadly to very positive facts don’t worry, it’s a necessary and perfectly normal mechanism, just as when you see someone crying with joy, you should know that the happiness they feel is so great that it goes beyond the most natural expression of emotion.
Tears reveal neither weakness nor drama, on the contrary, they are a direct expression of a person’s great ability to feel and the emotion that circumstances cause in his body.