Crying is for all - Cry for a better you

The problem & why is it important?

Crying is often seen as a sign of weakness and unacceptable for men in some cultures (Becht & Vingerhoets, 2002). Men are expected to express emotions associated with dominance, power, and competence, especially in competitive contexts, whereas women are expected to display powerless emotions like fear, sadness, and shame (Timmers et al., 2003; De Haan and Vos, 2003).

A research found out that women cry about 3 to 5 times more frequently than men in a month (Nyklícek, et al, 2004). Menendez (2013) in his research findings also suggested that men cry less frequently and intensely than women; especially in expressing anger. 

(Menendez, 2013)

It is really due to social pressure and expectation that shapes men’s attitudes and behaviour towards crying (Van Hemert, 2011). Branney (2008) suggested that ‘Boys don’t cry’ is an example of how developing boys being socialised into becoming emotionally inarticulate men, where they are forced to conceal their emotions (e.g. boys who do cry, they will be bullied and boys who do cry, their parents will quickly tell them to stop because they should not cry) (Hendriks, Croon & Vingerhoets, 2008). One of the effect from this social norm is that when men have depression, they are less likely to express them and as a result it is hard to detect the problem at the early stage - end up it become too late to treat; hence, there are more men than women in suicide attempt. 

Hence, it comes to our concern that CRYING is indeed for everyone, but we make it look like it’s not! Crying is a way that allow you to release your stress, sadness, grief, anxiety and frustration. Also, you can cry for joy, say when a baby is born or when a student passed a difficult exam. What is more, tears of relief feels cleansing, a way to purge pent up emotions so people do not lodge in their bodies as stress symptoms such as pain or fatigue. To stay healthy and release stress, people are encouraged to cry. For both men and women, tears are a sign of courage, strength and authenticity (Rottenberg, Bylsma & Vingerhoets, 2018).

Crying is the manifestations of our emotions that we have the right to express it or not. There are a lot of research focuses on the benefits of crying and the negative effects of not crying, but there is still a lack of awareness of it among the society we are living in. 

Our project is aiming to spread the awareness that it is okay and it is a good thing to cry by sharing a poster about it with informational captions on our social media accounts. Through our project, we share with our audience the benefits of crying and how can holding back your tears become a disadvantage for us. Lastly, we are not enforcing people to cry publicly but rather to cry their emotions out wherever and whenever they want to, be it under the rain, in the shower, or on the pillow :) 

Our targeted audience

• Social media users
• 12 years old to 25 years old
• Asian Culture (our social media followers)

Our poster project will be posted mainly on all of our social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Weibo). Thus, our friends and followers are mostly among 12 to 25 years old and are from Asian cultural background (as we are from Asia ourselves). We all know that young social media users are not found to read long information :p In order for us to ensure that our friends read through the poster; we create an attractive, simple and concise poster where they will need an only short time to view it! 

Our Intervention

Before we did a poster related to this issue, we do a random survey on Twitter to understand about our audiences' view on crying:

Then, we did a poster about this issue focusing on;

• Crying is a way of help-seeking since we are a baby, but why do we stop as we grow up?
• The benefits of crying as a sign of in need of help, and releasing body toxins
• The disadvantage of crying which is associated with poor help-seeking.
• We encourage our audience to cry it out wherever they felt comfortable, as long as they cry it out!

Basically, we want to focus on how crying is not a sign of weakness, but it makes us stronger to search for help when we need one. Even though you cry it out privately and no one is there to help you; you will feel better and are more at ease to search help from others. People who are used to hold back their tears will have a hard time to understand themselves when they really need help - holding back tears is like denying that you have a problem. As a result, when you have a problem such as mental health problems; you do not know that you need any help and you are less likely to seek help.

Then, we share the poster together with some research findings to support our claim through social media platforms:

• Facebook

• Twitter

• Instagram

• WhatsApp

We share the project to different WhatsApp groups:

Our friends also shared about our projects on their WhatsApp Status:

• Weibo

Psychological and persuasion techniques used in our project

The first approach we used was based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). 

This model states that there are two routes to persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route. The central route of persuasion is a likely result of the person’s careful consideration of the information at hand and involves a high level of message elaboration and cognition about the arguments at hand. The peripheral route of persuasion involves the person making simple inferences about the merits of the position in the argument, and are more related to positive and negative cues in the stimulus.

• For the poster, we used the Peripheral Route of Persuasion
• Highlights the important points only and uses the image of a man crying to make the poster interesting and attractive
• The poster consisted of fewer words which does not require the audience to spend much attention span on it

• However, we also used the Central Route of Persuasion
• We focused on the elaboration of the points we provided in the poster in our social media’s caption/status
• We will include the research papers reference to strengthen our arguments on our stance
• We wanted to cater our audiences who are interested to know about this topic - so we need to provide enough reliable evidence to persuade them

Many other users share information that is related to our followers/consumers and throughout the net; acted as a cue for internet users/consumers to process information online - they are more likely to read/view the content (Teng, et. al, 2014)

We used the Yale Attitude Change approach

This approach can be described as “who said what to whom”. Who: the source of the communication. What: the nature of the communication. Whom: the nature of the audience (Hovland, Janis & Kelley, 1953). According to this approach, plenty of factors affect each component of persuasion. The sincerity and quality of the source, the technique of expression, the medium, the attractiveness of the message, and age of the audience can affect an audience’s attitude change with a persuasive communication.

• Who
• We included few researchers to support our findings which act as authoritative figures in our Behaviour Change Project
• What
• We focused on ‘Crying’ which are very relatable to everyone as it is one of the ways people express their emotions. 
• Focusing on the benefits of crying and disadvantage of not crying might attract people’s attention both who regularly cries (supporting their behaviour) and those who choose to not cry often (can understand the implications of their choices)
• How
• We use social media to spread the messages by sharing the poster we made accompanied by informative captions/status
• The poster is very simple and concise which can attract people to view it quickly
• While the information provided will give them strong evidence for those who wanted to understand more about the issues
• Whom
• Our audiences are social media users - they are more open-minded as they are always exposed to new issues every day through their social media 
• Aged 25 years old and below; they are susceptible to changes as they are still building their mental representation

We also applied one of Cialdini’s Persuasion Style

The social proof principle we used claims that we tend to have more trust in things that are popular or endorsed by people that we trust. 

• Familiarity/Social Proofing
• By using social media, our poster will repeatedly appear on people’s timeline (i.e. shared on Facebook, retweeted on Twitter)
• People will always bump into it and will eventually persuade to believe and influenced by the ideas that we highlighted.

Lim & Lee-Won (2017) found out that Twitter retweets have a positive effect on persuasion

We also included the Attribution Theory

Attribution theory is concerned with how ordinary people explain the causes of behaviour and events. According to Fiske and Taylor (1991), Attribution theory deals with how people use informations to display a causal judgment for the event. It examines what kind of information is gathered by the audience and how it is combined to form a causal judgment. 

• We acknowledge our audience as different individuals who have different personality; some are introverts, some are extraverts.
• We attributed them as having different preference on where to cry - some people prefer to cry publicly and there are those who like a private one.
• So, they might felt the issues are relevant to information posters are mentioning things that they do

When crying is attributed to a positive working performance, workers show a positive attitude towards the behaviour of crying at work (Becker, 2017)

Our recommendation and conclusion

One of the possible efforts to do in relation to increasing awareness of this issue is to create a social media account focusing on this matter. Through that account, we can continuously share information about crying such as tips on crying effectively, the do’s and don’ts, and many more. Also, we can provide a medium for people to share their thoughts on the issues and even their stories on improving their emotional regulation. However, for this effort to be effective, we need to make sure to ask for professional opinions and always refer to them before posting information. This is to avoid sharing unreliable contents.

Lastly, it is hard for us to measure the behaviour change of our audience in this project, but we believe that the more people share the poster across the internet, the more people can get the benefit from it and maybe one of them can apply it to their everyday life. We really hope people can get some benefits from our project. 

We need never be ashamed of our tears. Do not apologise for crying :)

Thank you! 

Reference

Becht, M. C., & Vingerhoets, A. J. (2002). Crying and mood change: A cross-cultural study.  Cognition & Emotion, 16(1), 87-101.

Becker, W., Conroy, S., Djurdjevic, E., & Gross, M. (2017). Crying is in the eyes of the          beholder: an attribution theory framework of crying at work. Emotion Review, 1-13.

Branney, P., & White, A. (2008). Big boys don’t cry: depression and men. Advances in          Psychiatric Treatment, 14, 256 - 262.

De Haan, W., & Vos, J. (2003). A crying shame: The over-rationalized conception of man in  the rational choice perspective. Theoretical Criminology, 7(1), 29-54.

Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social cognition. Mcgraw-Hill Book Company.

Hendriks, M. C., Croon, M. A., & Vingerhoets, A. J. (2008). Social reactions to adult crying: The help-soliciting function of tears. The Journal of social psychology, 148(1), 22-42.

Hovland, C. I., Janis, I. L., & Kelley, H. H. (1953). Communication and persuasion.

Lim, Y. S., & Lee-Won, R. J. (2017). When retweets persuade: The persuasive effects of      dialogic retweeting and the role of social presence in organizations’ Twitter-based communication. Telematics and informatics, 34(5), 422-433.

Menendez, M., S., & Campbell, A. 2013. Sadness and anger: boys, girls, and crying in          adolescence. Psychology of Men and Masculinity, 4, 400-410.

Nyklícek, I., Temoshok, L., & Vingerhoets, A. (Eds.). (2004). Emotional expression and          health: Advances in theory, assessment and clinical applications. Routledge.

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. In      Communication and persuasion (pp. 1-24). Springer, New York, NY.

Rottenberg, J., Bylsma, L. M., & Vingerhoets, A. J. (2008). Is crying beneficial? Current        Directions in Psychological Science, 17(6), 400-404.

Teng, S., Khong, K., W., & Goh, W., W. (2014) Conceptualizing persuasive messages using  ELM in social media. Journal of Internet Commerce, 13 (1), 65-87.

Timmers, M., Fischer, A. H., & Manstead, A. S. R. (2003). Ability versus vulnerability: Beliefs about men’s and women’s emotional behavior. Cognition & Emotion,17, 41–63.

Van Hemert, D., A., Van de Vijer, F., J., R., & Vingerhoets, A., J., J., M. (2011). Culture and    crying: prevalences and gender differences. Cross Cultural Research, 45 (4), 399 - 431.