Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by evoking social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were conducted almost exclusively on participants from North America and Europe, resulting in limited generalizability. This project examined the tears-social support intentions effect and possible mediating and moderating variables in a fully pre-registered study across 7007 participants (24,886 ratings) and 41 countries spanning all populated continents. Participants were presented with four pictures out of 100 possible targets with or without digitally-added tears. We confirmed the main prediction that seeing a tearful individual elicits the intention to support, d = 0.49 [0.43, 0.55]. Our data suggest that this effect could be mediated by perceiving the crying target as warmer and more helpless, feeling more connected, as well as feeling more empathic concern for the crier, but not by an increase in personal distress of the observer. The effect was moderated by the situational valence, identifying the target as part of one's group, and trait empathic concern. A neutral situation, high trait empathic concern, and low identification increased the effect. We observed high heterogeneity across countries that was, via split-half validation, best explained by country-level GDP per capita and subjective well-being with stronger effects for higher-scoring countries. These findings suggest that tears can function as social glue, providing one possible explanation why emotional crying persists into adulthood.

含泪的哭泣是一种普遍存在的并且可能是独特的人类现象。学者们争辩说，情感的眼泪起着依恋的作用：眼泪被认为是一种社会胶水。通过唤起社会支持的意图。最初的实验研究通过多种方法支持了这一观点，但这些方法几乎完全是针对北美和欧洲的参与者进行的，因此推广性有限。该项目在一项针对7007名参与者（24,886个评分）和遍布所有大洲的41个国家的完全预先注册的研究中，研究了眼泪-社会支持意愿的影响以及可能的中介和调节变量。在100个可能的目标中，有或没有数字化的眼泪，向参与者展示了四张照片。我们确认了一个主要预测，即看到一个流泪的人会激发出支持的意图，d ＝ 0.49 [0.43，0.55]。我们的数据表明，可以通过将哭泣的目标感知为更温暖，更无助，感觉更紧密的联系以及对传讯者的更同情的关注来介导这种效果，但不能通过增加观察者的个人苦恼来实现。通过情境化合价，将目标确定为一个人的群体以及特质共情关注减轻了这种影响。中立的情况，高特质的共情关注和低认同感增加了效果。我们观察到各国之间存在高度异质性，这可以通过半分裂验证来很好地解释为国家一级的人均国内生产总值和主观幸福感，对得分较高的国家影响更大。这些发现表明，眼泪可以起到社交胶水的作用，这可能解释了为什么情感哭泣会持续到成年。