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

Abstract

Background: This pre-registered study extends previous findings that swearing alleviates pain tolerance by assessing the effects of a conventional swear word (“fuck”) and two new “swear” words, “fouch” and “twizpipe”.Method: A mixed sex group of participants (N = 92) completed a repeated measures experimental design augmented by mediation analysis. The independent variable was Word with the levels, “fuck” v. “fouch” v. “twizpipe” v. a neutral word. The dependent variables were emotion rating, humour rating, distraction rating, cold pressor pain threshold, cold pressor pain tolerance, pain perception score and change from resting heart rate. Possible mediation effects were assessed for emotion, humour and distraction ratings. Results: For conventional swearing (“fuck”), confirmatory analyses found a 32% increase in pain threshold and a 33% increase in pain tolerance, accompanied by increased ratings for emotion, humour and distraction, relative to the neutral word condition. The new “swear” words, “fouch” and “twizpipe” were rated higher than the neutral word for emotion and humour although these words did not affect pain threshold or tolerance. Changes in heart rate, pain perception and were absent, as were mediation effects.Conclusions: Our data replicate previous findings that repeating a swear word at a steady pace and volume benefits pain tolerance, extending this finding to pain threshold. Our data cannot explain how such effects are manifest, although distraction appears to be of little importance, and emotion is worthy of future study. The new “swear” words did not alleviate pain even though participants rated them as emotion evoking and humorous.

An Exploratory Analysis of the Relation between Offensive Language and Mental Health

“…bad, hate, sick, suffer) in the posts of users showing signs of depression, where the discourse of users not showing any signs contains more sexual-related content, addressing our RQ2. These findings are consistent with the existing literature from psychology (Stephens and Robertson, 2020;Everaert et al, 2017;Beck and Haigh, 2014).…”

“…The use of offensive language could be an emotion regulation strategy through which depressed individuals relieve some of their distress. Similarly, pain and distress studies indicate that the use of offensive language when experiencing pain significantly diminishes the level of pain experienced (Stephens and Robertson, 2020), suggesting that the use of offensive language can relieve distress.…”

Effect of swearing on strength: Disinhibition as a potential mediator

“…Positive and negative emotion, two opposite sides of the coin with respect to the reward seeking nature of BAS activation (Hirsh, Galinsky & Zhong, 2011), were assessed based on previous research linking swearing to emotion (e.g. Stephens & Robertson, 2020;Stephens & Zile, 2016). We assessed humour based on the finding that the word "fuck" was rated in the top 1% funniest of 5000 individually presented English words (Engelthaler & Hills, 2018).…”

“…We assessed humour based on the finding that the word "fuck" was rated in the top 1% funniest of 5000 individually presented English words (Engelthaler & Hills, 2018). Humour, also linked with activation of reward circuitry in the brain (Watson, Matthews & Allman, 2007) and therefore with BAS activity, has previously been shown to be increased after swearing (Stephens & Robertson, 2020).…”

“…That most languages include swear words (Van Lancker & Cummings, 1999) suggests they fulfil one or more useful functions and researchers have begun to evidence a variety of beneficial effects of swearing. Repeating a swear word has been found to alleviate the physical pain of immersing one's hand in ice cold water (Robertson, Robinson & Stephens, 2017;Stephens, Atkins & Kingston, 2009;Stephens & Umland, 2011;Stephens & Robertson, 2020) and the social pain of being ostracised (Philipp & Lombardo, 2017).…”