When Patients Cry

We Are Unique When We Cry

A Review of Michael Trimble, Why humans like to cry: Tragedy, evolution, and the brain. Crying is an important human behavior, and we are all aware of the impact that our tears can have on others, and theirs on us. From an ethological perspective, the survival value of crying is clear, particularly in the case of infants and small children. However, much less is known about the evolutionary mea...

"When I Want to Cry I Can't": Inability to Cry Following SSRI Treatment.

INTRODUCTION We describe seven cases of patients with an inability to cry after treatment with selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) medication, even during sad or distressing situations that would have normally initiated a crying episode, in the light of the role of the serotonergic system in emotional expression. METHOD Case series drawn from patients attended in a secondary care p...

When victims don't cry: children's understandings of victimization, compliance, and subversion.

How do children understand situations in which the targets of moral transgressions do not complain about the way they are treated? One-hundred and twenty participants aged 5, 7, 10, 13, and 16 years were interviewed about hypothetical situations in which one child ("transgressor") made an apparently unfair demand of another child ("victim"), who then responded by either resisting, complying, or...

When Veps Cry: Two-Year-Olds Efficiently Learn Novel Words from Linguistic Contexts Alone

We assessed 24-month-old infants’ lexical processing efficiency for both novel and familiar words. Prior work documented that 19-month-olds successfully identify referents of familiar words (e.g., The dog is so little) as well as novel words whose meanings were informed only by the surrounding sentence (e.g., The vep is crying), but that the speed with which they identify the referents of novel...

A Cry from Kenya