Word: painful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Swearing increases your pain tolerance," says Richard Stephens, a psychologist and lead author of the study, which was published this week in the journal NeuroReport. Although the experiment's initial hypothesis was inspired by anecdotal evidence from some pain researchers that swearing was actually a maladaptive behavior that served only to make things worse, Stephens' findings showed exactly the opposite. "The No. 1 priority is to make the pain go away. If [swearing] made the pain worse, that would be illogical," Stephens says, adding that you hardly need a scientific study to bear out the theory...
...really, really hard," he says, "and while it was throbbing, I swore a bit." Being a psychologist, of course that got him thinking, Why did I react in that way? Later, he witnessed his wife do the same thing while giving birth to their daughter - at moments of intense pain, she would holler expletives. "She immediately apologized," he remembers, "but [the medical staff] said, 'Don't apologize! We get this all the time.' " (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
...exploration of the psychology of language. Pinker distinguishes cathartic cursing from using profanity descriptively, idiomatically, abusively or for emphasis, and points to similar behavior in animals that suggests its evolutionary roots. If you step on a dog or cat's tail, it will let out a sharp yelp of pain, for example. "Swearing probably comes from a very primitive reflex that evolved in animals," Pinker says. "In humans, our vocal tract has been hijacked by our language skills," so instead of barking out a random sound, "we articulate our yelp with a word colored with negative emotion...
...more complex cortex - the abundant gray matter on which humans rely for language and reason, among other sophisticated abilities. "We have intact frontal lobes, which inhibit these responses," Sidtis explains. But in certain circumstances - either because we don't bother to inhibit them or because the shock of pain or discomfort momentarily surpasses the safeguards - our impulse for obscenity takes over. "In that way, it's like the dog when you step on his tail," Sidtis says...
...consistent with fight or flight. But while it is typically fear that triggers the stress response, Stephens suggests the salient emotion in this case is not fear but aggression. "In swearing, people have an emotional response, and it's the emotional response that actually triggers the reduction of pain," says Stephens, whose next step is to research the relationship between induced aggression and reduction of pain. (In past studies, the opposite has been found: higher levels of pain tolerance predict heightened aggression...