Emotional tears facilitate the recognition of sadness and the
perceived need for social supportEvolutionary Psychology 11(1):
148-158 The tearing effect refers to the relevance of tears as
an important visual cue adding meaning to human facial
expression. However, little is known about how people process
these visual cues and their mediating role in terms of emotion
perception and person judgment. We therefore conducted two
experiments in which we measured the influence of tears on the
identification of sadness and the perceived need for social
support at an early perceptional level. In two experiments (1
and 2), participants were exposed to sad and neutral faces. In
both experiments, the face stimuli were presented for 50
milliseconds. In experiment 1, tears were digitally added to sad
faces in one condition. Participants demonstrated a significant
faster recognition of sad faces with tears compared to those
without tears. In experiment 2, tears were added to neutral
faces as well. Participants had to indica