Because we often associate tears with sadness, it may seem strange to cry when you’re happy. In fact, when we cry for something we think is positive rather than something sad, we call our tears “tears of joy.”
Moreover, crying has some positive effects on our health and actually helps us manage our emotions. Let’s look at how it relates to our crying when we’re happy.
Tears are divided into three different types.
- Basic tear: It is the tear that is in your eyes all day. It acts as a lubricant and disinfectant for your eyes.
- Psychic or emotional tears: These are the tears we shed in response to an emotional event, including happiness. These tears contain stress hormones.
- Irritating tears: They wash our eyes when something bothers or gets into our eyes. A common example is the tears shed while cutting onions.
We shed tears as an emotional response, including happiness.
A psychiatry researcher at Penn State College of Medicine, Dr. According to Jordan Lewis, when emotions overwhelm us, our brains can’t always distinguish between happy and sad responses. The hypothalamus, an almond-sized part of our brain, responds to strong neural signals from the amygdala, which is responsible for recording our emotional responses.
This response mainly involves the activation of the body’s parasympathetic nervous system (responsible for activities such as sexual arousal, salivation, tears, urination) which helps us to calm down by releasing the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which leads to the production of tears.
Crying relieves overly felt emotions.
If we explain in a simpler language; Crying helps regulate “excessive” emotions. Research shows that; even if there are positive feelings such as joy, joy, happiness, gratitude; Experiencing certain emotions too intensely can feel “uncontrollable” and “overly”.
To release these emotions and initiate the calming process, our body also releases the cry response. Experts believe that tears reflect emotions that cannot be expressed or complemented by other behaviors.
Crying with happiness is connected with wanting to squeeze a sweet baby.
We can define the term used as “dimorph” in the literature as “biform”. Dimorph is the appearance of expressions from the same place in different ways. For example, when we see a baby or puppy, we are urged to have aggressive feelings such as squeezing or biting. In fact, mostly “I will eat you!” we say.
Of course, we wouldn’t want to eat or hurt that animal or baby. However, at that moment, the emotions are so intense that we may not know how to cope and make such impulses and words. Expressions from the same place, such as crying with happiness, come in different forms.