Tears have a specific content in salts, hormones, water and antibodies. This has been showed by recent researches that also proposed hypotheses on their utility for humans, the only mammals that produce tears for psychological purposes. Tears have been supposed to be less frequent in adult males for evolutionary reasons: men’s cheeks are less sensible to the tears’ strokes than women’s, for being hairy or more exposed to physical agents (cold, sun). Newborns are supposed to be immune from producing tears because their constant prone position doesn’t allow tears to massage their cheeks.
Figure 1 A human tear under the microscope (1x150). Here we report the main hypotheses on the meaning and origin of human psychological tearing.
Article Type
Image Article
Publication history
2021 Copyright OAT. All rights reserv
Received date: March 02, 2017
Accepted date: March 09, 2017
Published date: March 13, 2017
Copyright
© 2017 Bellieni CV. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation
Bellieni CV (2017) Structure and meaning of tears. Glob Imaging Insights 2: DOI: 10.15761/GII.1000117
Corresponding author
Carlo Valerio Bellieni
Medical Director, Department of Pediatrics, University of Siena, Italy.
