cry me a milliliter
Jan. 7th, 2011 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
molly_oThe Post today had a moderately interesting article about a study to see whether chemicals in tears might influence people nearby.
To conduct the study, the research team posted an ad on the Weizmann Institute campus seeking volunteers who could cry easily. About 60 women and one man responded. They were screened to see how easily they cried and to determine the volume of tears they produced.
"We reached this core group of six women criers who could come back to the lab every other day and cry a full" milliliter, Sobel said.
Each woman chose a movie to elicit crying, watching it in private and collecting tears. By far the most successful tear-inducer was the death scene in "The Champ," a 1979 film starring Jon Voight about an over-the-hill boxer making a comeback to provide a better future for his son, whom he is raising on his own.
"That scene is a winner," Sobel said. "Emotion labs all over the world use it to establish sad mood."
Other reliable tear-jerkers were "Life Is Beautiful," "Terms of Endearment," "When a Man Loves a Woman" and an Israeli movie, "Broken Wings."
I very VERY rarely cry at movies, but for some reason the end of West Side Story always brings me to tears. And way-back-when I sobbed for 20 or 30 minutes after seeing David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly. The friends I saw it with were initially mortified (we were all still in high school, young enough to be mortified by things like that), and at first they teased me gently about it, but they actually got kinda freaked out when I just kept crying.
(Honestly, it was PMS. I know that's a diagnosis that's been completely devalued by being tossed around anytime a woman is ticked off, but that incident was one of a handful of times in my life that I've had a bizarrely disproportionate emotional reaction -- even at the time, I could tell it was out of proportion, but I couldn't stop -- and then gotten my period within 12-24 hours.)
To conduct the study, the research team posted an ad on the Weizmann Institute campus seeking volunteers who could cry easily. About 60 women and one man responded. They were screened to see how easily they cried and to determine the volume of tears they produced.
"We reached this core group of six women criers who could come back to the lab every other day and cry a full" milliliter, Sobel said.
Each woman chose a movie to elicit crying, watching it in private and collecting tears. By far the most successful tear-inducer was the death scene in "The Champ," a 1979 film starring Jon Voight about an over-the-hill boxer making a comeback to provide a better future for his son, whom he is raising on his own.
"That scene is a winner," Sobel said. "Emotion labs all over the world use it to establish sad mood."
Other reliable tear-jerkers were "Life Is Beautiful," "Terms of Endearment," "When a Man Loves a Woman" and an Israeli movie, "Broken Wings."
I very VERY rarely cry at movies, but for some reason the end of West Side Story always brings me to tears. And way-back-when I sobbed for 20 or 30 minutes after seeing David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly. The friends I saw it with were initially mortified (we were all still in high school, young enough to be mortified by things like that), and at first they teased me gently about it, but they actually got kinda freaked out when I just kept crying.
(Honestly, it was PMS. I know that's a diagnosis that's been completely devalued by being tossed around anytime a woman is ticked off, but that incident was one of a handful of times in my life that I've had a bizarrely disproportionate emotional reaction -- even at the time, I could tell it was out of proportion, but I couldn't stop -- and then gotten my period within 12-24 hours.)