Aristotle wrote that crying “cleanses the mind” of suppressed emotions, it turns out that many of these folk beliefs about tears don't hold up—and not just the more extreme ones about witches or emotional vapors.

Charles Darwin viewed tears as a meaningless physiological byproduct. He acknowledged that children cry out vocally, but he thought that tears were a result of contracting the muscles around the eyes.

If crying made a person feel better, it wasn't because of the tears; "the writhing of the whole body, the grinding of the teeth, and the uttering of piercing shrieks, all give relief under an agony of pain,"