Here’s the Science of the Happy Cry

New York Magazine:

On Monday, Oxford Dictionaries released its word — or shall we say, feeling — of the year: that oxymoronic emoji your buds are always tossing around in text conversations, which shows a smiley face lined with streaming tears on either side, meant to convey something along the lines of “tears of joy” or “laughing to the point of crying.”

On the one hand, yes, it is kind of ridiculous to select an emoji as the “word” of the year. But on the other hand, there really isn’t an existing English word that expresses the incongruous emotional outburst that little emoji gets across. Apart from happy tears, consider nervous laughter, or seeing something so achingly adorable you have to … eat it?

…

In a paper published earlier last year in the journal Psychological Science, Oriana Aragon at Yale University’s department of psychology has explored the paradox of “cute aggression,” where a person is so overwhelmed by the dawww-worthiness of a subject that they express a desire to eat that squishy little thing right up.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine