What is the phisiological response behind people crying when crowds cheer and clap?
I don’t consider myself an overly emotional person. Yet, any time I hear a crowd clapping or cheering, my body has an immediate and involuntary reaction to start crying/hyperventilate a bit but in a happy way?
Yesterday there was a race in my town and I hear someone ring a cowbell and was on the verge of tears. Why?? Rationally, I have no sentimental attachment towards the race, sport, people doing it. Is it just sensory overload? Is it a quick boost of serotonin or adrenaline?
In: Biology
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There are a lot of intricacies in socially-learned behaviours. Add on top of that the intricacies of emotionally-based behaviours like crying, for example, and you get a complex response that isn’t necessarily easy to describe in practical terms.
Scientifically, we don’t really know why some people cry when they are happy, or why some people don’t feel the need to cry when they are sad. A significant part of it seems to be learned behaviour because there can be various cultural pressures with crying being seen as weakness etc and so people can learn to not cry as an emotional response. People are more prone to crying when they are tired or stressed, meaning that there’s some kind of emotional threshold and that it isn’t a simple constant.
There are some theories that suggest the brain struggles to sometimes interpret the difference between a strong positive and a strong negative response, and can release acetylcholine via the parasympathetic nervous system which will trigger crying outside of the typically associated emotional cues.
As for why certain people might be led to cry when there is a large positive crowd response – the effect of crowds has long been understood to have strong psychological effects. It can change our way of thinking and can impact and impair certain logical reasoning and lead to strong emotional responses.
In terms of specific mechanisms, I don’t think a good, detailed scientific rationale for these things exist. But a more handwavy response can be along the lines of: your brain can interpret strong positive responses in a way that leads to crying, crowd phychology can lead you to experience a strong emotional response to certain cues, and variation between individuals can mean that some people experience this kind of stimulus that mixes all of this up together.
Physiological reasons for tears is to rinse out things. Different causes for things needing to be rinsed out have their own mechanisms that trigger tears being created by the body. In the scenario described I would presume it to be similar to crying due to sadness, which is to help wash away excess stress hormones (yes, even positive experiences are stressors).
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