Suppression of support intention when crying behavior is perceived as intentional

Abstract

The social support hypothesis posits that emotional crying has a social function in eliciting support from others and is said to occur regardless of gender, culture, location, or emotional valence. However, if the crying behavior is perceived as having the intent to manipulate others, support is predicted to be inhibited; nevertheless, this has not been veried in practice. therefore, in this study, we used a scenario to manipulate the presence or absence of crying behavior and the intentionality of crying behavior to test this prediction (n＝44). the results demonstrated that when crying behavior was perceived as intentional, anger emotion was significantly higher, and support intention was significantly lower compared to not-crying and notintentional crying, supporting the prediction. The results of this study indicate that not all types of crying elicit support, suggesting that there are exceptions to the social support hypothesis