Depressed people don't cry more.

• Position: Mental Health - Medical research

Depression evokes powerful images of sadness and despair that are often expressed by tears. However, common lore that depressed people cry more than those who are not depressed may be wrong, a Stanford (Calif.) University study indicates. The findings, which show how the emotions of depressed people become blunted, could lead to more-effective ways to treat the common mental illness.

According to research led by Jonathan Rottenberg, a fifth-year graduate student in psychology, depressed men and women are no more likely to cry than nondepressed ones when they watch a tear-jerking movie clip. Furthermore, people depressed for six months or longer are even less likely to cry than short-term sufferers. He says the study is an early effort to define better the emotional disturbances at the core of depression. "By figuring that out, we can begin to think about how we might better fix what's broken and design treatments that are more effective than the ones we currently have."

Depression afflicts one in five people during the course of a lifetime. Average bouts last six months, but the ailment can turn into a chronic illness. "Depression has devastating costs for society," Rottenberg emphasizes. "It costs people their jobs, costs people their marriages, and in all too many cases, it costs people their lives."

The researchers studied 48 women and 23 men with major depression and 24 women and nine men with no psychiatric problems. Volunteers sat alone in a small, comfortably furnished room and watched a one-minute film of coastal landscape scenery on a television set. The neutral film was used as a baseline for the second clip, which was taken from the 1979 movie "The Champ." The three-minute scene shows a young boy learning about the death of his father in which he reacts first with disbelief and then becomes increasingly inconsolable. Participants were monitored for how much they cried and how sad they looked. They also were...