4 ms·
Seems to me like dumping a chemical out of your tear ducts is exactly the type of thing you can test.
by mod 10y ago
Seems to me like dumping a chemical out of your tear ducts is exactly the type of thing you can test.
- wickawic 10y agoReminds me of all the historic (and continuing!) confusion around women's sexual health.
- Chris2048 10y agoHow so?
- GrinningFool 10y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria
- Chris2048 10y agoI mean what is the link to tears, just "confusion"? Also, Victorian attitudes to female hysteria are confounded by JC attitudes towards female sexuality.
- GrinningFool 10y agoAh, ok - I read the "how so" in the context of GGP post: "Reminds me of all the historic (and continuing!) confusion around women's sexual health"
- rosser 10y agoI don't think the difficulty in testing that hypothesis is whether your samples have some chemicals in them or not. It's finding a sample population, and the collection of their samples. That is, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of profoundly rude to approach someone in the midst of terrible grief, all, "I see you're weeping over your loss. Let me have some of your tears for science!" You could "pre-enroll" people — say, the families of terminally ill patients — to collect their own tears when they do suffer that loss, and weep for it. Even then, though, compliance is going to be difficult to manage. Their priority in that moment isn't your experiment; it's their own devastation. And absolutely rightly so. Having to stop, or even momentarily diminish, their weeping to fetch the sample kit — do they even have it with them? do they remember where it is? — then open it up (because it has to be sterile, right?) and jab it in their face might also have a materially deleterious effect on the grief-processing role that their weeping in that moment is supposed to provide. If so, that might also taint the results of the experiment, no? So, no, it's not just a matter of testing for the presence of some chemicals. (Edited for clarity and phrasing.)
- Angostura 10y agoOr you could just find people who are prone to cry at sad films (since I've had kids - me).
- rosser 10y agoSure. I cry at movies and shows pretty often, too. (The finale of "Six Feet Under"? OMFG.) But that presumes those tears aren't somehow subtly different from personal grief tears. I really doubt they are, but if we're going to ask the question, it behooves us to get the most accurate answer possible.