Swearing makes you "%&*#$!" feel better!
Ever stubbed your toe? If there's one thing to make even the most mild-mannered of us swear like a drunken sailor it's banging a pinkie.
Well it turns out four-letter words may help ease the agony of a bleeding foot somewhat.
A new study from at Keele University suggests turning the air blue helps us deal with pain.
Inspiration for the new study came to psychologist Richard Stephens as he listened to his wife let loose with some unsavory language during the throes of labor.
What Stephens's wife thought when he started making notes might explain a few of the expletives.
He and his colleagues conducted an experiment to test whether uttering emotion-laden choice words can actually change the amount of pain people feel.
Students (38 males and 29 females) each immersed a hand in cold water (about 5degs C) for as long as they could stand it, while repeating either a swear word or an innocuous word.
When people had a swear word for their mantra (popular choices: the s-word, the f-word, two b-words and a c-word), they were able to keep a hand in the chilly water longer. What's more, after the ordeal, people who swore reported less pain.
Stephens turned up some interesting differences between men and women. Although swearing helped both sexes keep their hands in cold water longer, women reported a greater decrease in perceived pain after the experiment.
It is thought swear words are unique in that they are a close link between the language and emotional systems.
Would you have "%&*#$!" believed it?!
Weird Science Factoid: Elephants, lions and camels roamed Alaska 12,000 years ago. Then Sarah Palin's ancestors arrived...
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
