British men are abandoning their stiff upper lips but still do not wear their hearts on their sleeves like Americans, a new survey showed on Tuesday.

When it comes to raw emotion, the once buttoned-up Brits are now happy to shed tears quite openly -- but Italians can still "out-sob" them.

"Thirty percent of all British males have cried in the last month. That is a very high figure," said Peter Marsh, director of the Social Issues Research Center which took the emotional temperature of Britain.

"Only two percent said they could not remember when they last cried," the head of the independent research group said.

Long gone is the "No Tears -- We're British" era when emotion was considered distinctly bad form.

"In our poll of 2,000 people, very few people in their forties or fifties had seen their father cry. Now it is twice as many," he told Reuters. "Seventy-seven percent of men considered crying in public increasingly acceptable."

Almost half the British men opened the floodgates over a sad movie, book or TV program. Self-pity got 17 percent crying. Nine percent sobbed at weddings.

"You can see what is happening over the generations. Role models burst into tears at the drop of a hat -- people like (England soccer captain) David Beckham with his New Man image.

"He had a little cry when he took his son Brooklyn to school for the first time," Marsh said.

Women's battle for equal rights has certainly had an effect -- both in the workplace and at home.

"Men in their twenties or thirties are interacting with women on equal terms much more so than a generation ago. They have to relate to the opposite sex. Women become more man-like and men become more female. That transfers into the work place too," Marsh said.

From the days of Empire, the British have always considered themselves models of reserve, haughtily mocking "excitable foreigners" who show no restraint.

Marsh argued the divide was still there: "We have probably not caught up with the Americans or the Italians when it comes to the actual display of emotions."

"But we are clearly shifting. What we take as typical British reserve has been significantly eroded."

Reflecting on the survey's findings, clinical psychologist Ron Bracey agreed.

"We are catching up with Americans but are not nearly as open as the French, Italians and the Greeks," he told Reuters.

"In the United States, there are five times as many psychologists as there are in UK. That might be self-indulgent but the Americans want to know what makes them tick."

(Agencies September 23, 2004)