Читать книгу Emotional Rollercoaster: A Journey Through the Science of Feelings - Claudia Hammond - Страница 25

In the second exhibition room at the National Gallery in London there are three cool cream benches, lined up one behind the other. We sit and watch in silence, apart from the inevitable occasional cough. On the wall in front of us there’s a life-size photograph of five people standing in two rows – a man and a woman at the front, and three men behind them. Although they are close together they don’t look at each other. Three of the people are staring at the same place in the middle distance. The woman has her arms crossed in front of her chest, one hand on top of the other. Slowly her left fist clenches tightly. This isn’t a photograph after all. The people are moving, very slowly. The woman looks angry, yet despairing. Who is she gazing at? She opens her mouth and her shoulders rise. She is trying to control her emotions but still looks tortured with distress. What terrible thing could she be watching? Has she just seen the man who killed her child? Behind her shoulder, a man has his eyes closed while he smiles in beatific joy. His face is full of contentment, a sublime, holy contentment. The man at the front screws up his face in misery. Is he calling out? His hand moves up in front of his chest. He is distraught. Is he the husband of the distressed woman? He doesn’t even glance at her; he seems to be in his own world of agony. Another man has his hand on the woman’s shoulder, but despite her distress he is almost smiling. He looks proudly happy. He could be watching his child playing a musical instrument. How could he be so happy when two of the others are so distressed? The woman’s bottom lip starts to jut out in anger. Her hands are clasped together so tightly that the veins on her forearms stand out making dark shadows down her wrists. The tortured man continues to cry out. The man next to him puts his hand on his shoulder but takes no notice of his distress, continuing to stare into the distance. The moving photograph is in a frame and is lit like an old master. Light falls on the faces and there are dark shadows in the folds of their clothing. However, this isn’t an old master. It’s an artwork by Bill Viola called The Quintet of the Astonished.

It takes fifteen minutes for the emotions to play themselves out on the screen in slow motion. It’s uncomfortable to watch, but not because two of the people are so distressed. We know they are actors playing a part for the artist to film. The reason the film is discomforting is that you yearn for them to comfort each other. The man in religious ecstasy is so close behind the woman that at some points it’s almost as though he’s inhaling the smell of her hair and smiling in appreciation. They stand so close together that they are touching, but they never interact or even make eye contact. The man who is enjoying himself turns towards the distraught woman and puts his hand on her shoulder, but while you long for him to look into her eyes and show her that he’s there for her, he continues to smile instead. You find yourself wishing that if no one else is going to help the two tortured people, they could at least turn to each other and suffer together, but they are destined to suffer alone. The fact that it is so painful to watch these people standing so close and yet ignoring each other’s emotions shows us something fundamental about emotions – that they are an exceptionally strong form of communication. Crying in the presence of another is so powerful that it is unbearable to watch if that display of emotion is ignored.

If the purpose of tears is to communicate your sadness so that others will help, there is just one problem: people often cry on their own and report feeling better afterwards even though they have received no comfort from others. Moreover people often deliberately seek privacy if they want to cry. It has been suggested that even if you cry alone, you’re using yourself as an audience. You might give yourself comfort by sympathising with yourself, agreeing that you have the right to feel unhappy about your situation in the same way that a friend would.

It is possible that the opposing theories of Professor Frey and Randy Cornelius are in fact compatible. Perhaps we gain some relief from expelling the toxic by-products of stress in addition to communicating our distress and receiving comfort from others.

If crying can be beneficial, this raises the question of whether never crying, like the Professor of Tears himself, could be harmful. In the Western world there has long been an idea that if you suppress your tears you will do yourself physical damage. Back in 1847 Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote in the poem ‘The Princess’,

Home they brought the warrior dead;

She nor swooned nor uttered cry.

All her maids, watching said,

‘She must weep or she will die.’

It has been suggested that suppressing the emotions could increase a person’s chances of developing cancer, heart disease or high blood pressure. Related studies tend to focus on emotions in general and often anger in particular, rather than crying. However, in one study people were instructed to watch films while suppressing their tears and laughter. This was found to increase heart rate, so in theory if this behaviour pattern was repeated over many years a person’s health could be affected. Nevertheless, you are unlikely to be in situations where you are suppressing tears many times every day, so not crying probably only makes a difference to your health if you are suppressing all your emotions all of the time.

In eighteenth-century France collective tears were seen as enjoyable and compassion was expected from others, but by the nineteenth century suppressing tears was seen as evidence of self-control. A social dictionary of the time describes tears as ‘water too often ill-employed, for it remedies nothing’. When attitudes towards crying have been researched in more recent times, findings using questionnaires contrast sharply with the results of experiments held in the laboratory. In questionnaires women tend to say that they feel sympathetic when someone else cries, whereas men report feeling awkward or even manipulated. Women in particular seem to be accused of ‘turning on the waterworks’. Men report believing that it is inappropriate or a sign of weakness for a man to cry, but in laboratory experiments where people are actually crying the results are rather different. When a man cries after watching a sad film, both men and women consider him to be more likeable, while the weeping women are disliked for their tears. So although men may not like the idea of other men crying, when actually faced with it, they do not judge them. Perhaps men consider that if a man is crying his feelings must be profound and so he should taken seriously.

If crying succeeds in communicating our feelings then once again sadness is revealing that it does have a purpose. The family seeing off the woman with the linen jacket in my airport story, eyes wet with tears, would be signalling their sorrow. While that parting would be reflected in their brain chemistry, they would in fact be strengthening their bonds with the woman who was leaving. She would be able to see how much they cared, in a way they probably wouldn’t usually show her.

Although we don’t tend to think of it as a pleasant emotion, sadness is probably one that we are stuck with and although the value of sadness is hard to see, particularly when we are feeling sad, it might be an emotion with wisdom after all; an emotion which forces us to slow down, consider our plans and maybe change them. Sadness provides a light and shade in our emotional life. At the same time the outward signs of sadness like a down-turned mouth and that most potent but still mysterious communicator of sadness, tears, can bring us closer to those around us by signalling to them that we need them.