Why do we cry when we are sad?

Status Effect: [Distress Crying]

• Trigger: Emotional overload, physical pain, or extreme empathy response.
• Range: Close proximity (3m).
• Effects:
  • Stealth Buff: Invisible to enemies/predators. Limited detection range ensures situational safety.
  • Resource Drain: Consumes [Tear Reserve] (resource regenerates slowly). Excessive use risks [Eye Irritation] debuff.
  • Mobility Debuff:
    • Vision Impairment (-70% visibility): Reduced clarity due to teary eyes.
    • Coordination Loss (-40% dexterity): Shuddering sobs make precise movement difficult.
  • Ally Effect:
    • Helpfulness Aura (+Empathy): Nearby allies are more likely to assist due to perceived harmlessness and vulnerability.
• Cooldown: Natural emotional stabilization period required.

Hmm..... True.

Crying has everything to do with infanticide.

It also lowers male aggression, which protected babies from infanticide. Here come angry papa responding to the baby alarm!

In most primates, males commit the most infanticide. Humans are the exception. Infants are almost never killed by men. Women often kill their own newborn out of severe trauma. Though some kidnap and kill out of jelousy. Never trust a woman having a hard time getting pregnant. Never let her near your pregnant wife. Never let them alone with your newborn or young child.

Killing your own offspring out of spite is a very useful evolutionary advantage in species that need to put a lot of energy in their kids. Male forced you and fertilized your eggs? Just recycle and start over next time. In humans, it means not putting years of energy into a child forced on you. Kill and start over with a stable partner. Because of this, rape is only about seeking dominance and control over someone. It has nothing to do with reproduction anymore. Men commit more sexual assaults than women, but the motivation behind rape is the same. Women may be less violent, but still often torture their victims in other ways.

Adding factor is serial monogamy. Animals who lost their partner, are willing to neglect their offspring to increase their bond with the new mate when he/she doesn't accept their offspring. Humans do this too. The cold stepparent.

Baby killing is a natural behaviour. Albeit a horrid one. It's a way to maintain bodily autonomy for females in general, and especially useful when two parents are more succesful than a single parent. Menstruation made it so that infanticide would be even less likely. Menstruation reduces the chance of pregnancy by 40-60%. It's a preventive misscarriage known as embryonic wasting.

The defensive behaviour of reducing male aggression led to women crying more than men. Baby cries don't lower women's aggression. It might increase it. The smell of babies for sure increases female aggression. Mostly to protect their child from a jelous/grieving female who lost their baby (female-female competition is understudied) or from a controlling male bachelor looking to get the mother to ovulate again sooner so he can mate with her (with or without consent!).

Came here to say that, I can not remember the exact details but I read somewhere there is an additional chemical complexity to emotional tears as opposed to practical flushing tears that thickens them such that they flow more slowly down the face and so are visible for longer.

I wonder how thoroughly that's been explored - definitely have some contradicting anecdote. Used to have pet dogs that fucking adored each other, and when one died, the other become noticeably depressed, to include constant tears. I mean maybe it was just an oddly timed eye infection or something, but it sure looked related to the other's death.

If I remember correctly, elephants do something much like crying when they're sad, not identical, but quite similar.

Humans are not the only animal that sheds tears. Note they specify emotional tearing is considered uniquely human but do not specify tearing as uniquely human. Plus they studied tears in mice as stated in the beginning of the abstract.

Human Tears Contain a Chemosignal https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1198331

Abstract

Emotional tearing is a poorly understood behavior that is considered uniquely human. In mice, tears serve as a chemosignal. We therefore hypothesized that human tears may similarly serve a chemosignaling function. We found that merely sniffing negative-emotion–related odorless tears obtained from women donors induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of women’s faces. Moreover, after sniffing such tears, men experienced reduced self-rated sexual arousal, reduced physiological measures of arousal, and reduced levels of testosterone. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that sniffing women’s tears selectively reduced activity in brain substrates of sexual arousal in men.

But it is something I can never do.

👍

I feel like it happens because somewhere in your hindsight, deep in your sub conscious mind, you know that you'll be alright, whatever the loss be, or it's just that you don't actually really care, or there wasn't much of a deep intellectual connection between you too.

Man, I almost also felt the same, but when my gf left me for someone else, that shit hit me too hard.