Tears of Emotions

Emotional tears, a quality exclusive to humans, are a natural response to the feeling of intense emotional sensations [1]. Although crying is often associated with sadness, it can be triggered by a variety of emotions. Sometimes people cry because of physical pain, or because they feel deeply for someone else. Other times, something is so funny you can't help but laugh until tears stream down your face. Generally, crying isn't solely about the emotion itself; it is about the intensity of feeling that moves someone to tears [2]. 

In order to demonstrate that crying is a complex quality associated with a range of emotions, our creature, named Gary, expresses four different emotions with an unstoppable stream of tears pouring down its face. According to psychologist Paul Ekman, the six primary emotions humans have are anger, fear, disgust, sadness, happiness and surprise [3]. We chose to use happiness, anger, fear, and sadness as the emotions that Gary feels intensely (hence the antennae) and cause him to cry. These emotions are reflected by different sounds and lights: yellow lights and joyful music for happiness; red lights and fiery music for anger; purple lights and suspenseful music for fear; blue lights and melancholic music for sadness. The colours of the lights were chosen based on the characters of the Pixar movie Inside Out, in which each character represents a different emotion within the human mind [4].