Most people totally switch mental  gears when someone starts crying.

You might feel like you need to go into  problem solving mode to make them stop, or maybe you find your own aggression easing up and you instinctively want to treat them better. And that’s because crying  manipulates us physiologically.

Tears are a literal mind trick. But only if they’re authentic, because your brain responds totally different when they’re fake. So here’s what happens to you when you  hear, see, or smell someone crying. [♪ INTRO] Babies are master manipulators,  urging something deep within you to care for them non-stop.

If only they could do it using their adorable  laughs instead of their constant crying. But before you jump to the comments, I know. Technically, babies can’t  cry cry for at least a while, because it takes them a  few weeks to produce tears.

But just the visual of an  infant’s face when they’re crying is enough to produce a specific  response in your brain. And it’s different from what happens  when you see a teary eyed adult. For this revelation, we turn to a  study from The Netherlands and Italy that compared how women who didn’t have kids responded to looking at pictures  of tearful infants versus adults.

The researchers used functional magnetic  resonance imaging, or fMRI data, to peek into the mind of the  person witnessing the weeping. And they found that infant tears created  a stronger response than adult tears. Now here’s what I mean by “stronger response.” Since the participants were  looking at pictures of criers, the parts of their brains devoted to  processing visual images were generally active.

And when the participants  looked at infant pictures, those regions were even more active. So the researchers suggested that you take more notice of crying babies than crying adults. And on top of that, images of infant  tears activated the participants’ somatosensory cortex, which you use  to process physical stuff like pain.

That’s a feely part of the  brain, rather than a thinky part. It’s the part that may be inspiring you to do what you can to make the tears  stop because they hurt you. And that’s above and beyond the piercing screams.

A baby’s cries are powerful  enough to strike terror into anyone about to board  a transcontinental flight. And evolutionarily, that makes a lot of sense. Infants need you to help them out.

Just like evolutionarily, someone  who’s losing a fight needs it to end. And it turns out tears can help with that too. As amazing as it is that the mere  sight of tears can affect us, the smell of them can do the same thing.

One peer-reviewed study from  universities in Israel and the US concluded that sniffing someone else’s tears can cut your aggression by almost half. At least under certain conditions. These scientists had women collect the  tears right off of their own cheeks when they were watching sad movie scenes.

The tears were compared against salt-water that had rolled down the same cheeks. Just another day at the office I guess. Then, they asked male participants  to enter an MRI scanner to see how their brains responded  to either the real tears or fake tears while performing  an aggression assessment.

And yes, you heard me right. The tears all came from women  and the people in the MRI scanner getting tested for aggression were all men. I guess nice job reinforcing  gender stereotypes, scientists.

But let’s keep that study  limitation in our back pocket. So back to this aggression test. After the participants cozied  on up into the MRI scanner, the researchers had them play a  competitive online money-based game.

The researchers also told them their opponent would be another human, but that was a lie. They were really playing  against an algorithm designed to play unfairly and even take money  from the player from time to time. Which is something that could  definitely rile someone up.

But rather than waiting for an inevitable  table flip, the researchers measured aggression by quantifying how much  revenge the participants took in the game. Specifically, they could choose to deduct  money from their made up opponent’s pot even though they wouldn’t gain anything from it. They just didn’t want the rude algorithm, which they didn’t know wasn’t  another human, to get that dough.

By comparing the total number  of times that a player chose to deduct their opponent’s winnings, against  the total number of times the algorithm provoked the player, the researchers could  calculate a player’s “aggression metric”. And the aggression metrics for the  men who smelled the real tears were, on average, a whopping 43.7% lower than the aggression metrics for the fake tear group. Which, I mean, I don’t know if we  can just use that result to say that smelling someone’s tears makes  you less aggressive in general.

But we haven’t gotten to the MRI of it all, yet. Since the players were in a  big scanner the whole time, scientists could continuously monitor  how their brains responded to tears, and how those tears may have  triggered or suppressed aggression. And they found that when these  participants sniffed real tears, the smell part of their brains was  sending more signals to the amygdala, which helps regulate aggression,  and telling it to calm down.

But we can get even more specific than that. These scientists also put a bunch of  cells in a dish and covered them in tears to see what allows tears to initiate  sending a big “cease and desist” letter. They tested 62 different smell  receptors for their response to tears, and found four that were super sensitive.

So yeah. You might not think  that tears have a smell to them. But your brain appears to use the same  region to process odors as it does tears.

And a selection of those odor receptors  are pen pals with the cells in a different region of the brain  associated with aggression. Now, does this mean that I should  spike my friend’s reed diffuser with a bunch of tears when I  go over for a board game night so that we can avoid having to  deal with his combative cousin? Well, it couldn’t hurt.

But I think we might  need to wait for some follow-up research. So tears manipulate us in a number of ways. But they don’t just stop negative responses.

They also promote positive ones. A study from New York University  and Harvard Medical School found that you trust people more when  you see tears running down their face. And again, the researchers  reached these conclusions by asking people to play games.

Who knew crying studies were so much fun?! In the first game, you’re a merchant in a world where 10 cents is actually worth something. Because you have 10 cents and you need to choose whether or not to invest it in a farmer  who will use that money to grow food, and who might bring the food  back for you to sell at a profit.

So you have three potential outcomes. If you don’t invest in the farmer,  you’ll end the game with 10 cents. If you invest in the farmer and they give you their output to  sell, you’ll have 15 cents.

But if you invest in the farmer and  never see them again, you get nothing. Now that I’ve explained it, that doesn’t really sound like a very fun game,  but still better than Monopoly. Now, the farmer in question  wasn’t some faceless entity.

In fact, their face was super important here. Because the participants in this  study had to watch silent videos of a person with a neutral face that  either had tears flowing down it or didn’t. And they were told that that was their farmer.

And in the end, more people chose to invest in the crying farmer than the stoic farmer. To extract a little more  nuance out of that result, the researchers also had the  participants rate the farmer on a few different factors. And crying farmers were rated as  more sad, which makes a lot of sense, but also more trustworthy, which is a little odd.

And the investments were more correlated  with trustworthiness than sadness. But trustworthiness is kind of a  weird thing to associate with tears. So they ran another experiment to see if maybe they just felt bad for the crying farmers.

In another version of this  game-that’s-not-really-a-game, you’re an allocator of funds  instead of an investor. So you have to give up the money. It’s just a matter of who you give it to.

And instead of potentially  making either 15 cents or zero, you know you won’t make anything. So this game is more of a test  of altruism than the first one. But this time around, tears didn’t  have a significant effect on someone’s choice to allocate funds.

Players generally allocated the same amount of money to both criers and non-criers. So in this second scenario,  where there’s no chance for the player to see a payout, the trustworthiness  rating wasn’t correlated with tears. In other words, tears don’t seem to have  a generally altruistic effect on you.

Context matters, and that context includes the exact kind of relationship you have with a person. Now, after hearing about all these  ways that crying can be used to manipulate people, you might be worried that someone’s going to use that power against you. But it turns out you can’t force these benefits because many people can tell  fake crying from a mile away.

According to a study from Portugal and the UK, our brains respond differently to  authentic vs. acted blubbering. First, they collected audio samples  from people either recalling upsetting events and authentically crying, or cry-acting with full  control of their faculties. Then, they monitored people’s  brains while they listened to those crying recordings through headphones.

But instead of MRI scanners  like we mentioned earlier, these researchers used  electroencephalograms, or EEGs, to see what was going on in their heads. EEGs give the researchers different readouts based on the electrical activity in your brain. And in this study, when the researchers  looked at a general brain response, authentic crying produced much  larger output than fake crying.

But there was also a kind of phony-meter signature that was way bigger for fake cries. Now, just because an EEG can pick up  the difference doesn’t necessarily mean your conscious mind can  listen to someone’s cries and confidently proclaim  “Liar liar pants on fire!”. But if you trust yourself to tell the  difference between what’s real and what’s not, your brain can help steer  you in the right direction.

It can process the sight of an infant  crying and turn you into a protector. And it can evaluate the sight or  smell of someone breaking down in front of you and make you more  relaxed and trusting to help them. But your natural instincts won’t let liars manipulate you with the  sounds of tearful deception.

So I guess tears work for good, not evil. This video isn’t a sob story after all! Now if you want to keep learning  about crying, aggression, trust, and other wonders of the human psyche, you can check out the Study Hall  channel right here on YouTube!

At Study Hall, you take college-level  psychology courses, and get credit for them, all from your couch… or bed, or  wherever you’re watching this. Here’s how it works: You watch the course videos on  the Study Hall channel for free. Like the Intro to Psychology course,  or other common gen-ed courses like Code and Programming for Beginners,  and Rhetoric and Composition.

Then sign up for an online  college course led by faculty at Arizona State University for just  $25 and apply what you’ve learned. At the end of the course, if  you’re happy with your grade, you have the option to pay $400  which is about a third of the cost of a college course to get  three real and transferable college credits on your transcript! So whether you’re trying to learn  more about the somatosensory cortex, or earn college credit, or just  prove to yourself that you can do it, Study Hall can help you reach your  goals without the financial risk!

Check out the link in the  description or go to GoStudyHall.com to learn more and thanks for  learning with us here at Complexly. [♪ OUTRO]