Table of Contents

1: Why Only Humans Weep: Introduction to the theme
2: The Human Nature of Crying
3: Crying and Adaptation: The hardware
4: Crying over the Lifespan
5: The Antecedents and Context of Crying
6: The Intra-individual Effects of Crying
7: The Social Effects of Tears
8: Culture and Crying
9: Why Some People Cry More Often than Others
10: Male and Female Tears
11: Crying and Health
12: Too many tears...
13: A Cultural Historical Perspective of Tears
14: Epilogue

About the Author

Dr. Ad Vingerhoets is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands. He published over 300 articles on stress, emotions, and quality of life in scientific journals and co-authored/edited 18 books. His work on phenomena as crying, homesickness, sentiments, and 'leisure sickness' aroused much interest in the (inter)national popular media.

Reviews

`This is a wonderful book. It offers a new understanding of the meaning of tears. Most impressive is its ability to draw together ideas that span diverse fields and cover centuries of musings about crying. Early in the book the author offers a comprehensive model of adult crying. He then uses the model as a framework to gather the most recent scientific findings. By the book's end I found myself marvelling at the complexity of crying behaviour and in no
doubt of the centrality of tears to human experience.''
Dr Tom Whelan, School of Psychology, ACU Australian Catholic University, Australia
`Tears still are a poorly understood phenomenon among emotional phenomena, because humans are the only species who produce tears when experiencing certain emotions. This volume provides important contributions towards a better insight. It discusses all relevant problems and issues, in a more thorough way than has ever been done previously, it demonstrates the failures of some generally accepted suppositions, and comes up with some important first steps
towards a better understanding of weeping. 'Why only humans weep' is rich and interesting reading, I have learned a lot from reading it.'
Nico H. Frijda, author of The Emotions
`For too many years the study of facial behavior has been almost exclusively focused on facial expressions. But the face is a complex canvas against which, besides expressions, many different behaviors unfold: opening and closing orifices, muscular contortions, gaze, sounds, physical, contacts, approach-avoidance displacements and so on. Ad Vingerhoets book is a wonderful invitation to the study of one of the most dramatic, if not the most dramatic, facial
behaviors: crying. Researchers, practitioners and students will enjoy an extremely well-structured, entertaining and complete guide to the conceptual and empirical advances in the study of crying. As
Vingerhoets makes clear, understanding crying is definitely a crucial challenge on the path to understanding facial behavior and, by extension, human nature. This book is an important contribution to such an endeavour.'
Professor Jose-Miguel Fernandez-Dols, Facultad de Psicologia, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain
`The highly visible waterworks that humans put on display present a puzzle. Why do we need a signal that other primates do without, and what exactly is its meaning? Densely packed with the latest research on weeping, this book is a must read for anyone interested in the topic.'
Frans de Waal, C. H. Candler Professor and Director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes Primate Center, USA, and author of The Age of Empathy