Emotional Tears as Social Motivators: When and How Tearing Up Motivates Social Support

Emotional tears represent a basic expressive response that is most likely unique to humans. Researchers have debated the specific function of this phenomenon, with recent propositions suggesting that it mainly works as an interpersonal communicative signal motivating observers to provide help and social support to the tearful person. Here, we review evidence when and how emotional tears can act as a social motivator. Based on the emotions as social information model (EASI, Van Kleef, 2009), we investigate the importance of the emotional expression, the observer’s inferences, the observer’s affective reactions, and the situational determinants and integrate them to derive a model explaining the interpersonal functions of emotional tears. Overall, most evidence supports the idea that people tearing up, compared to people not tearing up in the exact same situation, are evaluated as less agentic, more communal, and elicit feelings of compassion in observers, which in turn is associated with higher support intentions. These relations are likely moderated by the perceived appropriateness of the expression, which is determined by characteristics of the expression, the expresser, the observer, and the situation. Our review identifies several gaps, suggesting that the specific relations among the different variables are yet to be determined and methods should focus on more ecologically valid designs and behavioral measures.