Crying Can Be Therapeutic, Research Says

Sharon Moore August 26, 2015

Feeling bad? Go ahead and cry it out. New research shows that while shedding a few tears leads to a dip in mood immediately after the crying jag, it makes you feel so much better after.

There have been conflicting results in studies made to assess the effects of crying in mental health. Retrospective studies, such as those that ask people to look back in time and describe a situation wherein they cried, generally find that crying can lift one’s mood. But laboratory studies, which assess people’s moods on a precise scale immediately after crying, often found that people feel worse after shedding some tears.

The new study, led by Asmir Gračanin of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, bridges the gap by measuring people’s moods at three different times: immediately after crying, 20 minutes afterward and then 90 minutes afterward.

"This is the first study that has demonstrated a clear relation between experimentally induced crying and subsequent, more long-term mood improvement,” says Gračanin.

In the study, the team asked 72 participants to watch an edited version of known tearjerkers: "La Vita è Bella,” a film about a Jewish father’s efforts to protect and care for his son in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, or "Hachi: A Dog’s Tale,” about a faithful dog who waits at the train station for his owner to come home even years after the man’s death.

To see how crying affected their mood, the researchers compared those questionnaire results to the answers participants gave before watching the movie. They found that criers felt worse immediately after the film, and then returned to their baseline moods, or how they felt before the movie, at the 20-minute mark.

Most interestingly, the film criers felt even better than they did before the film at the 90-minute mark, while participants who didn’t cry reported no significant changes to their mood, for better or worse, throughout the entire experiment.

Gračanin points out that crying helps the body physically calms down after a stressful or emotional struggle by regulating body temperature, blood pressure, and the like. While his study does not provide evidence that crying is directly beneficial to humans, Gračanin believes that people should not be discouraged from crying, especially in front who care for and support us.

Source of this article: Here’s Scientific Evidence That Crying Can Be Therapeutic