Word: painfulness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
According to a new study by British researchers, saying the F word or any other commonly used expletive can work to reduce physical pain - and it seems that people may use curse words by instinct. Indeed, as any owner of a banged shin, whacked funny bone or stubbed toe knows, dancing the agony jig - and shouting its profane theme tune - are about as automatic as the response to a doctor's reflex hammer. (See 20 ways to get healthy and stay that...
...figure out why, psychologists at Britain's Keele University recruited 64 college students and asked them to stick their hands in a bucket of ice water and endure the pain for several minutes. One group was allowed to repeat a curse word of their choice continuously while their hands were in the water; another group was asked to repeat a non-expletive control word, such as that which might be used to describe a table. The result was that swearing not only allowed students to withstand the discomfort longer, but also reduced their perception of pain intensity. Curse words...
...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...
...More people will be suffering.' DR. SEAN MACKEY, chief of pain management at the Stanford University School of Medicine, saying the agency's recommendation would burden physicians and patients and lead to higher health-care costs...