Guest lecture: Patrick Haggard (UCL London/Berlin)
“Crying as volition, emotion, communication” (work in progress)
Host: Michael Pauen
Emotional tears are unique to humans. Darwin famously judged them as
purposeless. In contrast, modern clinical psychology has viewed tears as a
communicative act that invites empathy and helping. However, almost no
controlled experimental studies of emotional crying exist. Some professional
actors can cry at will (or “on cue”), providing a convenient experimental
model of crying, and also providing an unusual window into the thought
processes underlying voluntary control of behaviour. I will discuss a
multi-method approach investigating the control and communicative value of
emotional tears using volitional crying by professional actors.
We first developed a questionnaire investigating how actors control
emotional crying. Analysis of 110 actors’ responses identified distinct
factors corresponding to cognitive, emotional, somatic and cultural aspects
of crying. The results of the questionnaire offer an interesting new
perspective on James-Lange theories that view emotions as responses to
bodily changes. Next, we video-recorded six of these actors trying to make
themselves cry, and showed pairs of brief video segments to 36 naïve
observers. The observers judged which video in each pair was more
emotionally intense. By comparing observers’ judgements to actors'
questionnaire responses, we identified the production factors that most
strongly influence perception of emotional crying. The results offer a
novel investigation of crying as a socio-communicative behaviour.
Location:
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Berlin School of Mind and Brain
Luisenstraße 56, Haus 1, Seminar Room 144 (ground floor)
10117 Berlin
Contact:
mb-manager@hu-berlin.de
