cry
Crying is an unspecific emotional expression that is assigned to facial expressions and is often, but not always, accompanied by tears . Crying is not tied to a specific emotion and occurs not only with pain , sadness , fear or anger , but also with joy and other strong emotions , e.g. B. when listening to music.
Similar to laughter, crying is one of the archetypal human expressive movements that are not learned. But the expression as social behavior is culturally standardized in different ways by situation- and gender-specific role expectations. Whether in animals - such as stressed elephants that produce tears - one can speak of crying as in humans is a matter of dispute in science.
etymology
The verb weeping for ' crying with tears' comes from the Old High German weinōn around 800. In Middle High German it was to cry , WENEN . The word originally emerged as an interjection from the Germanic * wai ( weh ), comparable to vaitóti '(weh) complain, whine, sigh, groan' from the dialectic vaĩ , vái 'weh (e)' , i.e. 'weh scream'. The adjective weepy , which means 'tending to weep, miserable, sad', was expanded at the beginning of the 16th century based on the model of miserable , ridiculous from the Middle High German wein (e )lich 'weeping, miserable, sad'. In the literary language , weeping became customary through Lessing as a translation from the synonymous French-speaking larmoyant .
Causes and functions
Crying is understood as an archetypal form of expression by all people, even if the form formed from utterances, sobs, facial expressions and tears can be different. Even in newborns, crying is understood as an expression of a feeling of movement and is interpreted as a function of the respective situation; it is one of the most important signals at the beginning of communicative relationships. Later on, crying is often an expression of pain, sadness, helplessness, fear or a feeling of deep hurt and injustice. But crying can also be an expression of pronounced joy (tears of joy) or it can follow a violent laugh.
Why people cry is controversial in research. Since Charles Darwin was one of the first to take up this topic, two theoretical perspectives have been discussed controversially, but these do not necessarily have to be mutually exclusive: crying as a form of communication and social interaction, i.e. social behavior , and crying as a protective reaction of the Body and psyche, which serve to reduce stress and tension or, more generally, to better process particularly emotional impressions.
There are plausible arguments for both theses, but there are contradicting investigations and studies that are often based on the subjective feelings of those affected. They perceive their own crying and its effect on their own psyche and the external impact of their crying differently. Contrary to popular belief, the majority of those questioned did not find their crying any easier. Little importance is attached to the purely physiological explanatory approach that the flow of tears serves to wash foreign bodies out of the eye or toxins out of the body, unless it is also understood in a figurative sense. Christian Ohrloff, press spokesman for the DOG and director of the University Eye Clinic in Frankfurt am Main, complained after an overview study in 2009 that the examinations available so far were mostly descriptive and unsystematic.
An American study in 2011 showed that the crying of an infant or toddler impaired the ability of an adult to concentrate more than, for B. correspondingly loud machine noises.
Concomitant lacrimation
Tears produced by crying differ in their chemical composition from tears produced to moisten the eyeball and contain significantly larger proportions of the hormones prolactin , adrenocorticotropin and leu-enkephalin as well as the elements potassium and manganese .
Cultural meaning
After death one speaks of "broken eyes". This impression arises when the activity of the lacrimal glands ceases with the extinction of life, so that the surface of the eye begins to dry out quickly.
A teardrop shape in gemstone cut is also called a tear , the technical term for this is pendeloque . In heraldry , tears are a symbol used.
literature
In the narrative material, tears occasionally have a symbolic meaning, which is related to their salt content and assumed healing power (Grimm's fairy tales: Rapunzel , The girl without hands , The goose-girl at the well ). Furthermore, the tears of a phoenix have a healing effect, with which they can heal wounds until they completely disappear in many stories, for example in Joanne K. Rowling's Harry Potter .
Tear (see English "tear") is an outdated or poetic name for tear .
music
Also known are the hits " Tears don't lie " by Michael Holm and " It's a tear to travel " by Salvatore Adamo . Other well-known tracks are " Teardrop " by Massive Attack , " Boys Don't Cry " by The Cure and " No Woman No Cry " by Bob Marley . The most famous tear song is " Tears in Heaven " by Eric Clapton . Rammstein's song “ Haifisch ” is also about tears in the chorus. There the tear is also referred to as " tenacious ". The British band Tears for Fears ( tears of fear ) has the English word for tear as part of their name. The best-known piece from the musical Evita by Andrew Lloyd Webber is entitled Don't Cry for Me Argentina .
Even in classical music are tears subject of emotional expression, as in some places in the St. Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach , as the final chorus " We sit down with tears ," in the Old - Arie " Have mercy, my God, for my tears willen ”, in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's “ When Tears Flow for Joy ”from “ The Abduction from the Seraglio ”or in Georg Schumann's six-part choir“ Tränenküglein ”.
Fine arts and painting
Edvard Munch's scream does not directly show tears, even if the screaming figure is tear-like. The sculpture Mask of Mourning was erected in Magadan in Russia to commemorate the horror of Stalinist terror. Tears are also realized in the sculpture in the form of smaller masks.
For her art project Topography of Tears , the photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher photographed tears under a light microscope, magnified one hundred times.
The world-famous photo "Tears" (1930) by the surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray shows no real tears, but glass beads positioned under the eyes of his model Kiki de Montparnasse .
Tattoos
Tattoos with the motif of one or more tears, so-called prison tears , are usually symbolically associated with criminal activities.
literature
- Tom Lutz: Shedding tears. Crying at the art . Europa-Verlag, Hamburg and Vienna 2000, ISBN 978-3-203-79575-1 .
- Jeffrey A. Kottler: The language of tears. Why do we cry . Diana Verlag, Munich and Zurich 1997, ISBN 3-8284-5002-4 .
- Ulrich Kropiunigg: Indians don't cry. About the suppression of tears in our culture . Kösel, Munich 2003, ISBN 978-3-466-30613-8 .
- Renate Möhrmann (Ed.): "So I have to cry bitterly". On the cultural history of tears (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 433). Kröner, Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-520-43301-5 .
- Meinolf Schumacher : Sin filth and purity of heart. Studies of the imagery of sin in Latin and German literature of the Middle Ages. Fink, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-7705-3127-2 (Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften 73), pp. 514-551 (“Cleaning with tears”) ( digitized version ).
- Hans Gerd Weinand: tears. Studies on crying in the German language and literature of the Middle Ages . Bouvier, Bonn 1958.
Web links
- Why do we cry when we are sad? - Question & answer on n-tv.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gemma Padley, et al .: 1001 photographies qu'il faut avoir vues dans la vie . Ed .: Paul Lowe. Éditions Flammarion, Paris 2018, ISBN 978-2-08-142221-6 , pp. 328 (Original Edition : 1001 Photographs You Must See In Your Lifetime , Quintessence Edition, 2017).
- ^ Etymological dictionary according to Pfeifer, online in DWDS , accessed on July 22, 2013
- ↑ Tear research: Howl! - Article by Alexander Grau, FAZ , December 31, 2006, No. 52, p. 65
- ↑ Women and men cry differently - emotional tears remain a mystery - press release of the German Ophthalmological Society (DOG), idw-online, October 14, 2009
- ↑ Rosemarie Sokol Chang, NS Thompson: Whines, cries, and motherese: Their relative power to distract . In: Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2011, pp. 131–141; Science Confirms It: Whining Is The Most Annoying Sound Ever
- ↑ A. Skorucak: The Science of Tears
- ^ Chip Walter: Why do we Cry? In: Scientific American Mind, Vol. 17 No. 6 (Dec. 2006), p. 44, ISSN 1555-2284
- ↑ Pierer's Universal Lexikon, Volume 7. Altenburg 1859, p. 33. here online at zeno.org
- ↑ Julika Meinert: What close-ups of tears reveal. welt.de, October 5, 2014, accessed October 8, 2014 .