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Psychological researchers from Keele University in the United Kingdom conducted the study on pain and the use of offensive language.
The researchers are Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston. Their paper “Swearing as a response to pain,” is published in the journal NeuroReport.
The abstract to the paper states, “Although a common pain response, whether swearing alters individuals’ experience of pain has not been investigated. This study investigated whether swearing affects cold-pressor pain tolerance (the ability to withstand immersing the hand in icy water), pain perception and heart rate.”
They asked sixty undergraduate students to place their hands in ice water.
The first time, they repeated a curse word repeatedly as a response to the pain of the icy water. The second time, they repeated a non-offensive word.
They group conducted the experiment in this manner, “In a repeated measures design, pain outcomes were assessed in participants asked to repeat a swear word versus a neutral word. In addition, sex differences and the roles of pain catastrophising, fear of pain and trait anxiety were explored.” [Abstract]
They found that the students were able to withstand the pain of feeling icy water much more when they said the curse words. The students also reported less pain when using curse words versus regular words.
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They found that, “Swearing increased pain tolerance, increased heart rate and decreased perceived pain compared with not swearing. However, swearing did not increase pain tolerance in males with a tendency to catastrophise [that is, the irrational thought process involving the belief that something is far worse than it actually is]."
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According to the WebMD article Go Ahead and Curse! It May Ease Your Pain, one of the authors of the study, Dr. Richard Stephens, stated, “Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon. It taps into emotional brain centers and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain. Our research shows one potential reason why swearing developed and why it persists."
The researchers do not know the exact association between why curse words help to lessen pain perception.
However, they think that offensive words cause the heart to beat faster and cause negative emotions in the person yelling the curse words.
That is, they have more emotion to help alleviate some of the feelings of pain.
