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EARTHDATE: April 24, 2011

Official News page 5


REAL LIFE NEWS: SWEARING IS A POWERFUL PAINKILLER

by Hazed

When you stub your toe, what do you do? You swear, obviously. Now it turns out that your involuntary expletives are powerful painkillers.

Yes, new research suggests that cursing helps to dull the perception of pain. Researchers from Keele University in the UK asked participants for the five words they'd likely use after hitting their thumb with a hammer. The first word they listed was the swearword they were asked to use during the experiment.

They were then instructed to submerge their unclenched hand in a container of ice-cold water and keep it there for as long as they could - all the while repeatedly cursing with their chosen word. Their heart rate was recorded before and after, and after they couldn't stand the cold temperature any longer they were asked to rain the amount of pain they were in.

This was compared to the effect of the subjects using a neutral word instead of a curse.

Researchers went into this study thinking that swearing would make the cold water feel much colder, by lowering their tolerance for pain and increasing their perception of it. "In fact, the opposite occurred," the report on the study says. "People withstood a moderately to strongly painful stimulus for significantly longer if they repeated a swear word rather than a nonswear word."

It seems the swearing accelerated the heart rate so the pschologists believe the flight-or-fight response was activated, possibly because cursing can fire up feelings of aggression.

The difference seems to be greater in women than in men - in particular, cursing "did not increase pain tolerance in males with a tendency to catastrophise." Well, men tend to be less stoic about suffering of any sort!

So next time you hurt yourself, don't hold back on the cursing - it really will help lessen the pain.

Source: http://bodyodd.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/04/19/6489832-swearing-really-is-a-powerful-painkiller-study-shows


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