Is crying a natural reaction to pain or is it a learned one?
I was thinking about how some people experience immense pain and don't cry and it occurred to me that crying could be an action learned by children to get parental attention when injured. Could someone knowledgeable about this explain it in greater detail?
6 Comments
87% Upvoted
This thread is archived
New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast
SORT BY
level 1
You already got a direct answer, but I figured you may appreciate a further breakdown of the topic (and I find this stuff fascinating). First though, we need to dissect your question a bit. The first thing we need to determine is if crying is a natural action at all. Then whether it's expressly connected to the pain response, and finally how this connection may evolve throughout life. I'll leave a few references at the end if you want further reading, and feel free to ask for more information if you like.
To answer the first part, yes. Crying is built into humans from the very start. We are social animals and our use of language is a huge part of that. However, human babies lack the ability to create complex speech when they are first born. As such, they rely on simple noises and crying for all communication. This is why babies - and especially 0-6 month olds - seem to cry all. the. time. Babies will cry when they're hungry, when they're upset, when they're hurt, when they want attention, and so on. This is where some of the nuance in your question comes up. Babies don't have any strong natural link between pain and crying. They simply always cry to communicate. This has a lot of parenting and evolutionary significance, too. It alerts parents quickly and effectively that there's a problem of some kind, which is essential to the baby's survival. However, due to the indiscriminate habits of babies to cry, their crying is also a common instigator of parental abuse.
So crying is a natural reaction in humans, absolutely. But is it tied to pain? Not really. Pain is an incredibly complex sensation. On the most basic level, it arises from nociceptors throughout the body, which signal the presence of potentially damaging stimuli. For example, if you touch a hot stove or step on a toy, the nociceptors in your hand/foot will signal your brain and warn of the harmful stimulus. This is where it gets tricky, though, because nociception isn't the same as pain. Nociception plays a role, but so do several brain areas. For example, the Insular cortex of the brain is considered to register your "emotional response" to pain, while the ACC is thought to identify pain as being "unpleasant". As an interesting aside, we don't know which area of the brain determines the direct pain response. It's a fascinating and complex process.
More to the point, this complex network underpinning your pain response has been found to be almost identical in infants, albeit it functions more slowly in them. This similarity suggests that infants experience pain in an incredibly similar way to full-grown adults, and they only cry in response to pain because they always cry to communicate. There is no real link between the two. This also explains why crying in response to pain becomes less common as humans age. As we get (1) better at coping with pain, and (2) better at communicating, we no longer need to cry when we get hurt.
Riem et al., (2011) "Oxytocin Modulates Amygdala, Insula, and Inferior Frontal Gyrus Responses to Infant Crying: A Randomized Controlled Trial." Biological Psychiatry
Tracey (2017), "Nociception". Current Biology
Fabrizi et al., (2016), "Encoding of mechanical nociception differs in the adult and infant brain". Scientific Reports
level 1
I don't actually have a scientific answer but considering newborn babies are usually smacked right after being born to make them cry, I'd garner crying is a very natural way of communication and not something learnt. In all honesty I'm pretty sure we learn to not cry when we want to, not vica versa.
No comments:
Post a Comment