NOT STRAIGHT ONES:

The crying game: Why we cry (Stephen Bayley, 2/03/11, The Tel;egraph)

Crying, it turns out, is a physiologically and psychologically complicated device we use to adapt ourselves to dramatic circumstances. And it’s a uniquely human prerogative: despite what you may have heard about crocodiles, animals do not cry.

Research in the Eighties at the University of Minnesota found that men cry once a month, while women cry five times as much. [...]

Crying indicates vulnerability: psychologists believe we empathise with a tearful person because we are reminded of a baby. But crying can also indicate terrible states of desolation. The critic Cyril Connolly claimed to be able to cry with boredom at demanding dinner parties. More impressively, he wrote: “Morning tears return; spirits at their lowest ebb. Approaching 40, sense of total failure.” That is what you might call a cry for help.

It is not entirely clear whether crying is evidence of emotional maturity or of indulgent self-pity; of pride, shame, joy, sadness or anger. Do tears demonstrate touching vulnerability or an annoying manipulativeness? A wholesome style of fearless emotional nudity, or an embarrassing lack of control? Actually, all of these things.

It's not necessarily self-pity, but it's obviously self-indulgence.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 15, 2011 7:05 AM