Research suggests that using curse words can be healthy and helpful. Photo by Adobe Stock/HealthDay News
Next time you’re primed to hold back a torrent of four-letter frustration, just let ‘er rip instead.
“Swearing is an easily available way to help yourself feel focused, confident and less distracted, and ‘go for it’ a little more,” said researcher Richard Stephens of Keele University in the U.K.
In a study published in the journal American Psychologist, he and his team reported that swearing helps people overcome inhibitions and push themselves harder on strength and endurance tests.
They had already revealed that swearing helps folks perform better on many physical challenges — from how long they can support their body weight during a push-up exercise to how long they can plunge their hand into ice water.
“That is now a well-replicated, reliable finding,” Stephens said in a news release. “But the question is: How is the swearing helping us? What’s the psychological mechanism?”
He and his team theorized that swearing helps people break free of social constraints and push themselves harder in challenging situations.
To confirm that theory, they enlisted 192 people in a couple of experiments.
Each participant was asked to repeat a swear word of their choice or a neutral word every two seconds while doing a chair pushup.
Afterward, they were asked about their mental state during the challenge.
The queries included measures of mental states linked to disinhibition, including how funny they found the situation and how funny, distracted and self-confident they felt.
The questions also included a measure of what’s known as psychological “flow” — a state in which people become immersed in an activity in a focused yet pleasant way.
As researchers expected, folks who swore during the chair pushup challenge were able to support their body weight significantly longer than those who invoked a neutral word.
The upshot: This difference could be explained by increases in participants’ reports of self-confidence, distraction, and psychological flow — all important parts of disinhibition.
“These findings help explain why swearing is so commonplace,” Stephens said.
“Swearing is literally a calorie neutral, drug free, low cost, readily available tool at our disposal for when we need a boost in performance,” he said.
Next up: Does the boost from swearing pay off in contexts where success hinges on overcoming hesitancy?
“Our labs are now studying how swearing influences public speaking and romantic approach behaviors, two situations where people tend to hesitate or second-guess themselves,” said study co-author Nicholas Washmuth of the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
More information
The journal Lingua has more about the power of swearing.
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