Crying Is Not Always a Relief, Study Says

KREMS, Austria - March 25, 2026 - PRLog -- Crying is often seen as a healthy emotional release. However, a new study suggests that the picture is more complex. In a four-week smartphone-based study, researchers found that crying did not generally make people feel better. Instead, its short-term emotional impact varied depending on the reason for crying. Crying after situations of emotional strain or feeling overwhelmed was linked to lower positive affect and higher negative affect, while crying in response to moving media content was associated with a reduction in negative affect. Conducted by researchers at Karl Landsteiner University (KL Krems), the study captured emotional crying in participants' everyday lives rather than in laboratory settings. The findings suggest that crying is not a uniform emotional response, but one whose short-term effects vary with the situation.

Adult emotional crying is a familiar behaviour unique to humans, but surprisingly little is known about how it actually affects mood outside artificial research settings. Earlier studies often relied either on retrospective questionnaires or on laboratory experiments, each of which has clear limitations. To examine crying under more natural conditions, researchers at KL Krems used an event-based experience sampling approach that captured crying episodes close to when they occurred in daily life, which reduced recall bias and allowed to study emotional states in a more natural setting than laboratory-based studies.

Original Publication: Effects of Crying on Affect: An Event-based Experience Sampling Study of Adult Emotional Crying, S. Stieger; H. Graf; S. Biebl. Collabra: Psychology 12(1), doi: 10.1525/collabra.157541. https://kris.kl.ac.at/en/publications/effects-of-crying-on-affect-an-event-based-experience-sampling-st/

More on KL Krems research: https://www.kl.ac.at/en/research/research-blog

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