Investigating the Influence of Tears-relevant Visual Cues on Contingency Judgments and Perceived Agency

Emotional crying refers to a unique human behavior of shedding tears in response to emotional events.Prior findings have suggested interpersonal benefits of eliciting social support can be triggered by emotional crying.We hypothesized that crying has a communication value in signaling distress or helplessness to others.Specifically, we investigated whether tearrelated visual cues influenced how individuals learn about and assess others' helplessness.Participants (N = 40) were presented with tearful and non-tearful facial stimuli during a learning sequence involving a contingency judgment task -assessing the correlation between an individual's actions (studying) and outcomes (passing a test).Results revealed that in both zero and positive contingency conditions, the presence of tears decreased the mean contingency rating; this suggested that the participants viewed the individual as more helpless.However, participants were also unable to discriminate between positive and zero contingency conditions when exposed to tear stimuli.We propose that the emotional salience of tears interferes with cognitive processes related to learning.We discuss these results in relation to alternative hypotheses involving potential carryover effects during learning.However, these findings suggest that tears function as a potent nonverbal cue for helplessness, highlighting their role in fostering social support.