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The emotional tears – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

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The emotional tears – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

The hidden calculations that determine whether you will cry

You may have found yourself tearing up at the movies or after hearing certain news. And you may have also found yourself discreetly wiping those tears away, lest you seem overly emotional. Cry me a river, as the jazz standard goes. But are emotional tears really a sign of being irrational? Modern evolutionary biology suggests a new take on this question: emotional tears – similar to reasoning and other mental traits – have been relentlessly optimised by natural selection for survival and reproduction. Your tears are, in a sense, rational. As adaptations that confer advantages in certain contexts, they are ecologically rational and shot through with strategic calculation. ….[READ]

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