Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech In common parlance, allowing yourself to have a “good cry” about something is usually associated with feelings of being freed or released from burden or stress. Yet there’s surprisingly little scientific research on the matter, leaving the question of whether there are actually emotional benefits to a nice sob session. Now, in a study published in the journal Collabra: Psychology, Karl Landsteiner University psychology professor Stefan Sieger and his colleagues tried to establish a more scientifically rigorous assessment of the effects of “emotional crying.” In an experiment, they invited 106 adult participants from Austria and Germany to track and self-report their emotional states 15, 30, and 60 minutes after a “crying episode was reported,” as well as their end-of-day emotional state, over a four-week period. (Just over 70 percent of participants were women, while 25 percent self-reported were men and around four percent reported as neither.) “Crying is a basic human behavior,” Stieger told PsyPost. “I was astonished …