As the song says, when you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. However, there are times when we do more than that-we instead cry. In fact, it's very common among all of us we have coined "tears of joy."
But then, isn't that ironic? We often associate crying with negative emotions such as fear, anger, and sadness. And yet we also cry when we feel elated or joyful. One researcher tries to provide the answer.
According to Oriana Aragon, a Yale University postdoctoral associate and the lead author of the study, to cry when we're happy is actually a normal response, a coping mechanism. The body tries to bring balance back into our emotions "negating" the positive feeling. This may also explain why some people laugh when they're nervous.
By contradicting the positive feeling with a "negative" reaction, you can easily recover from the initial intense emotion.
But to generate this conclusion, the researcher had to study the different reactions of her sample. They exposed participants to various scenarios like seeing cute babies or attending joyous reunions.
They discovered that their sample did have a quite opposite feeling to counter their initial emotion. For example, those who like to pinch the cheeks of the baby are also the ones who have the higher tendency to cry when their children graduate. People who love to attend concerts break down in tears and scream wildly once they catch a glimpse of the objective of their fanaticism.
On the other hand, those who received good news but reacted negatively tended to bounce back to a more stable emotion faster than the others.
While it's truly possible that a person who's supposed to be happy is also feeling sad or any other negative emotion, more often than not, such negative responses are not really part of the entire psychology of the person as of the moment.