by Anne StClair

Created on: July 30, 2009

Swearing is a common reaction to painful situations like hammering your hand instead of the nail it is holding, and even those who never swear in front of other people admit to swearing when there is pain involved. There is no doubt that swearing can feel good at times like this, but recent scientific studies suggest that swearing not only feels good, it actually improves a person's tolerance to pain.

Scientists at the School of Psychology at Keele University, near Newcastle-Under-Lyme in Staffordshire, England, began their research on swearing with the idea that people who swear when they feel pain would feel worse than people who did not swear, because swearing would make the painful event seem exaggerated and more important than it really was. Instead, the scientists, Dr. Richard Stephens, John Atkins and Andrew Kingston, found the opposite was true. According to the University's Facebook page, Dr. Stephens partly got the idea from seeing (and presumably hearing) his wife in labour!

The experiments, reported in the scientific journal Neuro Report, found that people who curse cope better with pain than people who do not. Swearing increased their tolerance to pain. The research tested 64 volunteer undergraduate students at the University by first having them submerge their hands into ice water for as long as possible, while repeating their favourite curse word, and then repeating the experiment while repeating one of five innocuous words used to describe a table.

The results were that the students could keep their hands in the ice water much longer when they swore than when they did not, which indicates there is a link between tolerance of pain and swearing, with tolerance increasing when they swore. This was the opposite effect to what the researchers had expected. Interestingly, male students who tend to 'catastrophise' did not show an increase in pain tolerance.

The scientists also found that heart rates increased when the students were swearing, indicating their level of aggression had increased. They also found that their perception of pain level (measured via a questionnaire) was reduced. The reason, they believe, is because swearing triggers the 'fight or flight' response normally triggered by fear or aggression. The body's response to swearing is both emotional and physical, as it seems to tap into emotional brain centres. Unlike most language, which arises in the left brain, swearing appears to arise in the right brain.

The pain-alleviating benefits of being foul-mouthed when pain is experienced is probably one of the reasons the practice originated in the first place, and could partly explain why it has remained popular throughout history.

References:

http://keeleuniversitypressoffice.wordpress.com/2009 /07/13/swearing/

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10019741422 6

http://journals.lww.com/neuroreport/Abstract/2009/08 050/Swearing_as_a_response_to_pain.4.aspx

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