Crying

Crying is a complex human behavior that is most often regarded as an irrepressible expression of pain or sorrow. Crying first appears immediately after birth, long before speaking, walking, and other forms of human behavior that exist across the lifespan. In its earliest form, it functions as instinctive signaling; the cry indicates to caretakers the infant's state of discomfort. Such crying can thus lead to burping, feeding, changing, holding, and other caretaker actions in the service of the infant's needs. Eventually, infants [Page 236]learn other strategies for meeting their needs, including grasping, walking, and speaking. As this happens, the role of crying as a form of social signaling diminishes for the child.

Nevertheless, crying persists in childhood and throughout adulthood, and can still be seen across the stages of life. In its most primeval form, crying persists as a spontaneous reaction to forms of discomfort or pain, especially in childhood. Adults are generally socialized against crying as a response to pain, however, there is a tendency to replace pain-driven crying with other forms of emotional release, such as swearing and screaming. Adults and children may also cry when something is lost, such as a valued object, family member, lover. Under such circumstances, the act of crying is regularly treated as an irrepressible emotional outburst, indicative of deeply experienced feelings.

The audience response to infant crying is important to any understanding of the relationship between crying and lying. First and foremost, the infant cry is experienced as authentic. The person who hears an infant crying takes the sound to be a genuine expression of a negative emotion, one that is deeper than a communicative strategy, and this means that audiences are primed to interpret crying as evidence of truth. The infant cry is also experienced as anguish-inducing. Mirror neurons that govern empathic experiences cause audiences to live the anguish of the other in an imitative neurological state, and this happens to audiences exposed to an infant's cry. Finally, the infant cry is experienced as impelling; it triggers within its audience a motivation to eliminate the infant's suffering, as well as its own.