The scene: New Zealand, a wilderness area along the coast.
The protagonist: A wet, half-naked Las Vegas psychologist named Jeffrey A. Kottler who was near death from hypothermia, having just waded across an icy bay, his clothes and pack on his head, during a solo trek that rangers said should be safe.
The plot: A dramatic rescue by hikers who dragged him to a hut, poured hot liquids into him and warmed the still-unconscious Kottler with their own body heat.
The surprise ending: Survival – and a 12-hour crying jag as Kottler imagined the pain his death would have caused his family.
That bout of tears changed his life, Kottler says, and led him to write an intriguing new book, “The Language of Tears,” on men, women and the mysteries of crying.
Aside from a very few, unconfirmed reports in animals – an Indian elephant here, an African gorilla there – humans are believed to be the only animals who shed tears when they are sad, joyous, angry, scared or otherwise overwhelmed by emotion.
Yet scientists know frustratingly little about whether there are differences between emotional tears and tears that just lubricate the eye, about differences between men’s and women’s tears or about their possible evolutionary role, like ridding the body of stress hormones or signalling submission to ward off an attacker.
Even psychologists, who spend their lives listening to people in tears, haven’t given much rigorous thought to tears, until recently.
All of which is a crying shame, says Kottler, who says ever since his epiphany Down Under, he has been fascinated by tears and has become – gasp – a man who is now moved to tears “very easily – and I am proud of that. It’s really cool.”
In fact, tears are increasingly cool, scientifically and politically.
Only a generation ago, Ed Muskie blew his 1972 presidential hopes by shedding a tear about a critical news report on his wife. Less than a decade ago, Colorado Congresswoman Pat Schroeder got endless grief for crying when she quit her presidential run in 1987.
Yet today, both Bill Clinton and Bob Dole seem so comfortable blubbering in public – dare one say “on cue?” – that the Wall Street Journal dubbed this campaign the “weepiest on record,” with only iron-man Ross Perot eschewing the snivels.
But it is not tearfully correct politics that fascinates researchers, but the makeup and function of tears. For more than a decade, the nation’s chief tear guru has been biochemist William Frey II, research director of the Ramsay Dry Eye and Tear Research Center in St. Paul.
Frey, who started studying tears at his mother’s suggestion, and others have uncovered a number of teary tidbits, to wit:
Adults sob only once in every dozen crying episodes.
Emotional tears contain more proteins than “irritant” tears, the kind you shed while slicing onions. Though Frey thinks this means that “something unique happens when people cry emotional tears,” other scientists have their doubts.
Both emotional and irritant tears contain 30 times more manganese than is found in blood, suggesting that human tear glands can concentrate and remove substances from the body. (In sea birds like gulls, albatrosses and cormorants, tear glands are more powerful than kidneys at removing toxic levels of salt from the body.)
About 85 percent of women and 73 percent of men say they feel better after crying, suggesting, says Frey, that “tears help remove chemicals that build up during stress.”
Women – surprise, surprise – cry four times more often than men, averaging 5.3 cries a month.
When men do cry, people may not even notice because male tears usually mean brimming eyes, not streams of tears cascading down the cheeks. “We cry, too,” says Kottler, “but women don’t understand it. Women think it’s not legitimate because we don’t make a lot of noise.”
Men’s and women’s tear glands are structurally different.
Yet nobody knows whether men’s and women’s tears are chemically different. Research does show that before puberty, boys and girls cry the same amount, but by age 18, women cry substantially more.
One obvious explanation is that boys may be told so often that real men don’t cry that they learn not to – a most regrettable phenomenon, as both Frey and Kottler see it.
But hormonal changes at puberty may also be involved. No one knows what effect, if any, estrogen may play in tearfulness, but data suggest that prolactin, a hormone that promotes secretion of milk and controls fluid balance. By age 18, women have 60 percent more prolactin than men.
Other biological processes may also influence production or composition of tears, though nobody has yet found precise links between changes in emotional state or specific biochemical changes in the brain and what gets secreted in tears.
Still, studies have shown that tears are triggered by nerves that pump out chemical messengers near tear glands and by circulating hormones, says physiologist Darlene Dartt, senior scientist at the Schepens Eye Research Institute in Boston.
Neurotransmitters like VIP and ACH, which have other, well-documented roles as chemical messengers, clearly trigger tears, she says, as do some pituitary hormones.
“There’s no question that specific biological pathways lead to emotional tears,” adds Dartt, “but we still don’t know which is more important – hormones or chemical messengers from nerves.”
Whatever the genesis of emotional tears, it’s long been known that everyday tears form a three-layered film that lubricates the eye. The mucin layer, closest to the eye’s surface, is made in the eyelid and on the surface of the eye; the aqueous or watery middle layer is made in the lacrimal gland above the eye; and the oily, top layer is made in the meibomian gland in the eyelid.
Normally, this three-tiered film protects the eye well.
But 10 million Americans, most of them women, do not make enough tears, a painful condition called “dry eye,” says endocrinologist David Sullivan, a senior scientist at Schepens.
In women, dry eye is often caused by Sjogren’s syndrome, a disease in which the body’s own antibodies attack the lacrimal gland, causing a shortage of aqueous tears.
In both men and women, dry eye can also result from a malfunctioning meibomian gland, producing too few oily tears.
Aging seems to make things worse, perhaps because the male hormone androgen seems to have something to do with tear formation, and both men and women have less of it as they get older. Many women get dry eye during menopause, when several hormones, including prolactin, also drop.
While over-the-counter “artificial tears” help keep eyes moist, using androgen eyedrops may work better, says Sullivan, who is testing the drops in patients now.
But tears do much more than keep eyeballs moist. They are a potent, if often misunderstood, mode of communication.
“There isn’t another form of emotional expression that can communicate so much,” says Kottler. “We can cry when we’re sad, despairing, depressed, sentimental, joyful, frustrated, angry, relieved, anxious or having an esthetic experience.”
Tears are so “riveting,” he adds, that “things stop” when someone starts to cry, because tears lend power and authenticity to whatever a person is doing or saying.
Just how easy it is to conjure up tears to manipulate people remains a subject of hot debate, as is the delicate matter of crying on the job (not on purpose), a common female fear.
What is clear, says Kottler, is that you can get better at dealing with tears, both your own and other people’s.
When someone starts to cry, the first step, he says, is to simply listen and perhaps touch or hold the person, if he or she indicates that that would be welcome.
“Men make the mistake, when women cry, of responding by saying, ‘What’s the problem? Let’s fix it.’ “
But listening is not enough. “The second part is encouraging some sort of verbal elaboration” – asking what the tears mean.
“You have to help people elaborate what’s going on inside,” he says. “People who are depressed cry all the time and feel worse,” he says, because depression is a kind of immobilized state, while sadness, once understood, can be “an intense feeling of being alive.”
The real key, he says, is this: “If crying brings you closer to other people, it’s good. If it pushes people away, it’s bad.”