Emotional Tears Facilitate the Recognition of Sadness and the Perceived Need for Social Support

The tearing effect refers to the relevance of tears as an important visual cue adding meaning to human facial expression. However, little is known about how people process these visual cues and their mediating role in terms of emotion perception and person judgment. We therefore conducted two experi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Evolutionary psychology 2013-01, Vol.11 (1), p.148-158
Main Authors: Balsters, Martijn J. H., Krahmer, Emiel J., Swerts, Marc G. J., Vingerhoets, Ad J. J. M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis of Variance
Cues
Emotions - physiology
Experiments
Facial Expression
Female
Fixation, Ocular - physiology
Humans
Male
Original
Perception - physiology
Reaction Time - physiology
Recognition, Psychology - physiology
Social Support
Tears
Young Adult
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Summary:The tearing effect refers to the relevance of tears as an important visual cue adding meaning to human facial expression. However, little is known about how people process these visual cues and their mediating role in terms of emotion perception and person judgment. We therefore conducted two experiments in which we measured the influence of tears on the identification of sadness and the perceived need for social support at an early perceptional level. In two experiments (1 and 2), participants were exposed to sad and neutral faces. In both experiments, the face stimuli were presented for 50 milliseconds. In experiment 1, tears were digitally added to sad faces in one condition. Participants demonstrated a significant faster recognition of sad faces with tears compared to those without tears. In experiment 2, tears were added to neutral faces as well. Participants had to indicate to what extent the displayed individuals were in need of social support. Study participants reported a greater perceived need for social support to both sad and neutral faces with tears than to those without tears. This study thus demonstrated that emotional tears serve as important visual cues at an early (pre-attentive) level.
ISSN:1474-7049
1474-7049
DOI:10.1177/147470491301100114