Curse words and obscene gestures can help reduce pain, according to new research.
If you want a quick and easy way of learning just how many curse words a person knows, try standing on their foot. Being in pain can do interesting things to our language, but could that volley of obscenities actually be helpful? New research suggests that both rude words and gestures could have a pain-reducing effect.
The study included 111 students at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, 61 percent of whom identified as women, with an average age of 19. Pain was inflicted using a well-known experimental method called the cold pressor task, in which a person’s hand is immersed in ice water for as long as they can stand it.
The study was designed to measure the effect of language and gestures, both “neutral” and “taboo”, on pain perception. In the language arm of the study, participants were asked to say either “fuck” or “flat” over and over while their hand was submerged in the cold water. In the gesture arm, they were told to stick either their middle finger (taboo) or index finger (neutral) up and down.
The participants were told to tell the experimenter as soon as they felt pain so that the time could be recorded. After the trial, they completed a pain rating scale and a word completion task designed to measure feelings of aggression.
Based on previous research, the scientists hypothesized that either flipping the bird or dropping the F-bomb every second would have an analgesic effect. And that appeared to be the case.
“We found that engaging in a taboo act […] enabled participants to withstand the pain in a cold pressor task for significantly longer than engaging in a neutral act,” the authors write in their paper.
More surprising was that there was no significant difference between the gesture or the language. Previous studies have shown that using swear words is linked to pain tolerance, and some have even suggested this as a possible reason for the stream of foul language that frequently emanates from labor and delivery suites. But as to why an obscene gesture works just as well, the scientists are less sure.
One theory the authors propose is that the process of making the middle finger gesture activates the same neural pathways as uttering the word “fuck”. It’s also possible that it evokes similar feelings and emotions without activating the word itself, but more research is needed to disentangle this.
The authors found no evidence from their study that the analgesic effect of swearing had anything to do with aggression, but point out that this could be a flaw in the study design: “we cannot rule out the possibility that aggression might be involved; perhaps our word stem completion and heart rate measures were not sensitive enough to detect changes in aggression.”
But there could have been another unintended upside to the inclusion of the word completion task – it seemed to distract the subjects from the actual purpose of the study, meaning they were less likely to unconsciously change their behavior to match what they thought the experimenters wanted to see. For this reason, the authors recommend including a similar cognitive task in future studies as a bit of a red herring, if for no other purpose.
Ultimately, it’s still not clear why swearing helps reduce pain perception, but this study is the latest in a string of investigations that have found this effect – and crucially, the authors say it’s the first to demonstrate that flipping someone off can have the same painkilling power as yelling “Fuck!” at the top of your lungs. Worth remembering the next time you stub your toe in a library.
The study is published in the journal Psychological Reports.
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