In interpersonal conflicts, staying calm tends to protect your reputation, while crying damages the reputation of your opponent alongside your own. This points to a social tradeoff where keeping your cool helps you look good, but shedding tears is more effective if you want to make the other person look bad. These findings were recently published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. Conflict between people is a naturally emotional process. When humans face disputes with colleagues, friends, or romantic partners, they often express sadness or anger to navigate the situation. While past scientific work has focused on how expressing emotions affects the person showing them, less is known about how these emotional responses impact the other person involved in the dispute. Scientists wanted to examine the reputational consequences of remaining calm compared to expressing active emotions like crying or yelling. They aimed to understand whether different emotional responses create different social tradeoffs for both the person expressing the emotion and the person receiving it. “Current emotion research focuses extensively on expressive emotions i.e. crying …