[BITList] Swearing

[michael J Feltham]

If you’ve never erupted into expletives after stubbing your toe, you’re only hurting yourself <https://wired.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d6a9b4ef731bfa16b27259de6&id=d602e0e8f5&e=b1fcb697a1>. No, seriously. Conventional scientific wisdom had held that swearing in pain was maladaptive—that it would make things worse by triggering that self-defeating “I can’t even” feeling—but psychologist Richard Stevens was skeptical. If swearing didn’t alleviate pain, why the heck was humanity wasting its gosh-darn time doing it? So he had students submerge their hands in really effing-cold ice water—once while repeating a neutral word and once while letting the swears fly. “The results,” writes Emma Byrne, “could best be summarized by the phrase ‘Maladaptive, my ass!’” Steven’s experiments found that swearing triggered the students’ fight-or-flight response, which helped them tolerate pain longer and even perceive it as less painful.
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