Hurt feelings and four letter words: Swearing alleviates the pain of social distress

Abstract

Methods for alleviating physical pain are increasingly found to attenuate social pain. Recent evidence suggests that swearing may attenuate sensitivity to physical pain. This study examined whether swearing similarly attenuates two consequences of social distress: social pain and exclusion‐induced hyperalgesia. Sixty‐two people wrote about an autobiographical experience of exclusion or inclusion. Then they repeated a swear or neutral word for 2 minutes followed by measures of social and physical pain. Excluded non‐swearers reported feeling more social pain and greater sensitivity to physical pain compared with included non‐swearers. Excluded swearers reported less social pain than excluded non‐swearers and no heightened sensitivity to physical pain. The findings suggest that social and physical pain are functionally similar and that swearing attenuates social pain.

Swearing as a response to pain: Assessing hypoalgesic effects of novel “swear” words

“…This study contributes to the psychology literature on swearing in the context of pain (Stephens et al, 2009;Stephens and Umland, 2011;Philipp and Lombardo, 2017;Robertson et al, 2017) as the first attempt to create new "swear" words and assess some of their psychological properties. Our experiment assessed the effects of repeating three different words -a conventional swear word ("fuck") and two new "swear" words ("fouch" and "twizpipe") -on pain perception and tolerance, compared with a neutral word control condition (a word to describe a table).…”

“…Swearing, defined as the use of taboo language conveying connotative information (Jay and Janschewitz, 2008), is a near-universal feature of language (van Lancker and Cummings, 1999). Research has shown that repeating a swear word can be an effective way of increasing tolerance for the physical pain of an ice water challenge (Stephens et al, 2009;Stephens and Umland, 2011;Robertson et al, 2017) and the social pain associated with ostracism (Philipp and Lombardo, 2017).…”

Preliminary evidence that androgen signaling is correlated with men's everyday language

“…Or, swearing might be a display of honesty (Feldman et al, 2017), which may be more common in men with high levels of T (Wibral, Dohmen, Klingmüller, Weber, & Falk, 2012). It is also possible that swearing is a method of tempering negative emotions during conflict (Philipp & Lombardo, 2017) that might have some beneficial effects on intimate relationships. We expect that examining the link between T, swearing, and relationship quality will be a fruitful next step, and given the general finding that laboratory-based research tends to underestimate differences between non-distressed and distressed couples (Fincham, 2003), these data point to the EAR as a more precise and ecologically valid methodology for analyzing intimate relationship discontent.…”

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“…Or, swearing might be a display of honesty (Feldman et al, 2017), which may be more common in men with high levels of T (Wibral, Dohmen, Klingmüller, Weber, & Falk, 2012). It is also possible that swearing is a method of tempering negative emotions during conflict (Philipp & Lombardo, 2017) that might have some beneficial effects on intimate relationships. We expect that examining the link between testosterone, swearing, and relationship quality will be a fruitful next step, and given the general finding that laboratory-based research tends to underestimate differences between non-distressed and distressed couples (Fincham, 2003), these data point to the EAR as a more precise and ecologically valid methodology for analyzing intimate relationship discontent.…”