Cursing found to physically relieve pain

Yelling f**k at great volume when getting your finger caught in a rapidly closed door may be an instinctive response that actually helps to alleviate pain according to a new study.

Detailed in the Aug. 5 issue of the journal NeuroReport, no previous research has connected swearing to the actual physical sensation of pain.

One of the authors of the new study, Richard Stephens of Keele University in England, said swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon.

"It taps into emotional brain centers and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain”, he said to LiveScience.

"If people experience the emotion of fear to a significant degree … their pain tolerance increases," Mr Stephens said to ABC. "There seems to be something similar here. Swearing is emotional language. If it's not fear, it might be aggression."

Alongside Keele researchers John Atkins and Andrew Kingston, the trio wanted to measure whether swearing would affect a person’s pain tolerance.

They believed that swearing often has an exaggerating effect that can overstate pain’s severity, and assumed swearing would lesson someone’s pain threshold – and they were dead wrong.

Using 67 undergraduates as their guinea pigs, the researchers had them place their hand in a tub of ice water as long as they could while repeating whichever swear word they liked. Then they repeated the experiment but only let them use a more common, non-profane word.

Confounding expectations, the volunteers were able to keep their hands submerged longer while swearing – it significantly increased their pain tolerance and heart rate, and decreased perceived pain, compared with not swearing.

The researchers hypothesise that swearing induces the body’s fight-or-flight response, increasing pain thresholds in the process.

They also think swearing may increase aggression, owing to accelerated heart rates.

"Our research shows one potential reason why swearing developed and why it persists," Stephens said LiveScience.