Human beings cry when they are overwhelmed with joy or sorrow, but men and women have different mechanisms in their psychological operation of crying. For women, crying occurs by the operation of feelings, which can be activated and continued by retrieving memory of emotions without the present inflow of sensory stimulation from outside. Women can easily cry when they are happy or sad by retrieving memory as well as by getting immersed into the current situation. When women feel sad and cry upon some current situation, they can easily fall into the identical feelings and continue with the feelings even when the situation is long gone.
However, for men, crying occurs by the activation of temporary moods that respond to the current situation that induces the inflow of sensory stimulation. Men can feel joy and sorrow as women do, but men do not store emotions in their memory and activate only moods for the present moment when the stimulation exists. Men cry as they get immersed into the present situation temporarily. Therefore, men hardly cry when they are happy since they cannot incorporate the present happy experience with all the stored accumulated feelings as women do. They just feel happy for the moment and the positive moods disappear soon along with the disappearance of the stimulation. They cry in a sad situation by getting immersed into the sad moods, but they can neither retrieve the sad emotions from memory nor cry when the situation is over.
For example, suppose a man and a woman are watching a sad movie and both of them are crying. The man is immersed into the present situation and activates moods to cry, and the woman is also immersed into the present situation and activates feelings to cry by combining the present situation and stored emotions. When some time passes after watching the movie, the man can hardly cry even when he thinks about the sad movie, but the woman can easily cry by retrieving the stored sad feelings associated with the movie and with other past sad incidents. That is, both men and women get immersed into the present sad situation and cry, but only women can retrieve the stored feelings and combine them with the present situation.
This mechanism explains another difference between men and women. Both men and women can either cry by getting immersed into the present situation or cry by imagining a sad situation when necessary. For men, it is always the operation of temporary moods that enable them to cry whether by getting immersed into the present situation or by imagining a sad situation. So, men crying by imagining a sad situation is simply considered to be fabricated out of some specific purpose.
On the other hand, when women cry, whether by getting immersed into the present situation or by imagining a sad situation, all their feelings are completely activated and assimilated with the crying. Women's crying becomes genuine regardless of their intention since they are designed to retrieve and connect stored feelings when they express emotions. Their crying becomes incorporated into real feelings even when they are imagined and fabricated at the beginning.
Real crying and faked crying can be differentiated for men, but it does not apply to women since women tend to transform even faked crying into real crying. Since this mechanism is not known to people, men mistakenly assume that women's sadness will disappear soon without leaving a trace when they see women crying, and women mistakenly assume that men will keep the sad feelings and remember them for a long time when they see men crying.
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