Slashdot Mirror
Swearing Provides Pain Relief, Say Scientists
Hugh Pickens writes "Scientific American reports that although cursing is notoriously decried in the public debate, scientists have discovered that swearing may serve an important function in relieving pain. 'Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it,' says Richard Stephens of Keele University in England. A study measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water. During the chilly exercise, they could repeat an expletive of their choice or chant a neutral word. When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer. How swearing achieves its physical effects is unclear, but the researchers speculate that brain circuitry linked to emotion is involved. Earlier studies have shown that unlike normal language, which relies on the outer few millimeters in the left hemisphere of the brain, expletives hinge on evolutionarily ancient structures buried deep inside the right half like the amygdala, an almond-shaped group of neurons that can trigger a fight-or-flight response in which our heart rate climbs and we become less sensitive to pain."
I call bullshit...
Why censor your expression? Just let it out.
FUCK!
w00t
Fucking shit, the Javascript on this fucking site is too fucking slow. Seriously. It's fucking horrible. Tons of pauses for no apparent reason for simple fucking basic tasks like showing a text box, sitting there and mocking you. They're laughing at you because you think it's bullshit but you stick around for it. End this madness! AHH MAKE THE DELAYS STOP!! Maybe my swearing will relieve the pain of fucking poorly coded JS.
Physical pain is easily overcome through the use of drugs. It is also controllable through meditation and other mind-tricks which move the focus of the mind and body from the pain to something else.
But what about emotional pain? Should I keep calling her and swearing at her until I feel better? I don't feel better so far.
Swearing out loud in front of other people can carry some baggage and consequence. It's risky social behavior. Any risk taking can generate some adrenaline. The adrenaline makes it easier to tolerate the pain.
It's like whenever I hear the phrase "no new taxes on anyone making under $250k." I just curse loudly enough to make my dogs leave the room, and I feel 1% better.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Okay, I guess I'd best get my daily dose:
Slashdot, fucking fix your fucking broken site, or fire the fucking incompetent fool doing the coding.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I've heard of people who are left unable to speak (due to a stroke or other brain trauma) still being able to curse and swear like sailors. This does seem to indicate that swearing is linked to something more than just the speech center.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
How do you explain swearing to yourself? I spent many nights during the past month pacing around my apartment with worsening cancer pain. Sometimes it got bad enough to elicit yelps and curses. There was nobody else around to give me an adrenaline rush from risky social behavior. It hurt, I swore, I felt a little better.
I also discovered that singing to myself helps with tolerating pain. I was laid out still on a hard radiation table for an hour. The first ten minutes were easy but the pain got worse and worse as I stayed in that one position. Since I couldn't move, I tried moaning to myself - which helped a little. On the third session I tried humming and singing along with my iPod, and found that was even more effective at helping me endure the pain to get the treatment.
Or when you're getting that really hot stove out of the oven
Yo dawg, I herd you like stoves, so I put a stove in your oven so you could cook while you cook!
Karnal
I work in a psycholinguistics lab that studies, among other things, the effects of being bilingual on cognitive functions, both linguistic and non-linguistic. While we haven't ourselves studied this question, I expect that cursing in a nondominant language would be less effective at prolonging the amount of time someone was willing to hold their hand in cold water, based on research that shows that words in one's nondominant language evoke less of an emotional response than words in one's dominant language.
I can't remember which papers support that statement, but a Google search reveals (at least) one paper claiming that bilinguals curse more often in their dominant languages (and while I haven't read it, I expect they controlled for frequency of use). If one of the purposes of swearing is to relieve emotional tension, that conclusion would make the most sense if swearing in your dominant language provided a greater emotional release. It wouldn't surprise me too much if the same thing was true for pain.