Dear colleague,

We are conducting a meta-analysis to analyze the interpersonal effects of emotional tears. We are interested in studies that focus on manipulating emotional tears and measure perceiver’s inferences, affective states and/or behavior.

We are currently gathering data of published or unpublished studies that meet the following criteria:

IV: Experimental, between/within-subjects manipulation of emotional tears

Manipulation of emotional tears by using pictures with tears added/removed, video stimuli with or without tears, vignettes describing someone shedding tears or no tears, or real-life encounters with people shedding tears or no tears.

DV: Measure of perceiver’s inferences, affective reactions, behavior/behavioral intentions.

These include: (1) inferences of criers’ agency, such as assertiveness (e.g., perceived sadness/helplessness, perceived aggressiveness) or ability (e.g., perceived competence) or communion, such as friendliness (e.g., perceived warmth) or morality (e.g., perceived honesty, perceived sincerity); (2) affective reactions such as felt compassion, felt distress, felt sadness, or felt anger;and (3) social support intentions or behavior (e.g. willingness to help or approach the crier).

Studies that meet these criteria include for example:

Hendriks, M. C., Croon, M. A., & Vingerhoets, A. J. (2008). Social reactions to adult crying: The help-soliciting function of tears. The Journal of Social Psychology, 148(1), 22-42.

van de Ven, N., Meijs, M. H., & Vingerhoets, A. (2017). What emotional tears convey: Tearful individuals are seen as warmer, but also as less competent. British Journal of Social Psychology, 56(1), 146-160.

Zickfeld, J. H., van de Ven, N., Pich, O., Schubert, T. W., Berkessel, J. B., Pizarro, J. J., ... & Vingerhoets, A. (2021). Tears evoke the intention to offer social support: A systematic investigation of the interpersonal effects of emotional crying across 41 countries. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 95, 104137.

We would like to include all published and unpublished studies that meet the criteria above.

If you have any relevant studies or datasets please send your manuscript or dataset (including a codebook) to Janis Zickfeld (jz@mgmt.au.dk) by the 15th of March.

If possible, we would like to include the raw dataset in the meta-analysis.

Kind regards,

Janis Zickfeld, Paweł Ciesielski & Monika Wróbel