Swearing Is Good for You

by Emma Byrne

  “The neighborhood borrower approached Mr. Smith at noon on Sunday and inquired ‘Say, Smith, are you using your lawnmower this afternoon?’ ‘Yes, I am,’ Smith replied warily. Then the neighborhood borrower answered . . .”

  1. “Oops!” as the rake he walked on barely missed his face;

  2. “Fine, then you won’t be wanting your golf clubs—I’ll just borrow them”;

  3. “Oh well, can I borrow it when you’re done, then?”;

  4. “The birds are always eating my grass seed.”

  It’s not the greatest joke ever written but, for most people, option 2 is the obvious punchline. Dr. Donald Stuss of the University of Toronto found that patients with damage to the front of their right hemisphere made twelve times as many mistakes on tests like these than patients with no brain damage. Even patients who had sustained similar amounts of damage to their left hemisphere did better on the test.6

  What’s more, these patients with right hemisphere damage showed no physical responses to jokes or humorous statements. Spare a thought for the poor research assistants, forced to tell joke after joke to an audience as tough as that. Thanks to their valiant attempts in the name of science, if not comedy, we can start to speculate on the reasons why patients with damage to their right brain might be so bad at swearing, and why ones with damage to the left brain might find it easier than any other type of speech. In most right-handed, English-speaking people at least, experiments like these show that the left hemisphere tends to house the parts that are essential for “controlled” language and the right hemisphere contains many of the parts that help us process emotion.

  One of the first hints about the difference between the hemispheres emerged back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when Professor Guido Gainotti, now at the Catholic University of Rome, studied patients who had suffered damage to one side of the brain. Those whose damage was limited to the left side became very agitated, upset, and angry in response to problems they encountered during their treatment—which seems understandable, perhaps even inevitable. However, in cases with damage to the right hemisphere, Professor Gainotti noted an “indifference reaction.” Nothing seemed to move these patients to even the slightest emotional response, even when they were faced with the devastating consequences of their brain damage.7 Professor Gainotti came to what seemed like the obvious conclusion: that the right hemisphere is where emotion “resides”—those patients with left-hemisphere damage were able to respond in a natural way to their illness: with anger, frustration, and depression. Those patients with right-hemisphere brain damage were reacting “unnaturally,” by not reacting at all.

  That Vulcan-like detachment might seem enviable in the face of a devastating stroke, but emotion is an essential part of our mental processing and losing it can be cognitively disastrous. Emotion works rapidly to switch our attention to things that might be a threat or a reward, and to change our behavior appropriately. In the most extreme cases it kicks in to help us flee from a threat. Emotions are quick and dirty processes that respond fast, even to confusing, fleeting, or ambiguous stimuli, before the conscious brain gets a look. In one experiment by Arne Öhman and colleagues at Uppsala University in Sweden, volunteers were shown images of snakes and spiders. The volunteers reacted with sweaty palms to images of snakes and spiders that were on screen for less than 1/300th of a second.8 For context, it takes about half a second for the brain to categorize and identify a visual stimulus. These volunteers were experiencing responses to pictures of spiders and snakes in less than a tenth of that time, i.e., before they had actually seen the spider or snake. Such apparently superhuman reaction times are due to the effect of emotions on our subconscious.

  This lack of access to emotional responses in patients with damage to their right hemisphere helps unpack the how and the why of swearing. Most obviously, it shows that swearing is inextricably bound up with our emotions, which suggests why patients with damage to the right brain stop swearing. One hypothesis is that these patients might no longer have the motivation to swear. If swearing is indeed the type of language that we reach for when we are angry or frustrated or joyous, then why swear if you never feel anger or frustration or joy? This is a very simple “if no emotion goes in, no swearing comes out” kind of argument.

  A second and more complicated hypothesis is based on the idea that swearing is actually a very specialized and emotionally fluent form of language that requires us to have a mental model of the emotions not just of ourselves but also of the person who hears us swearing. I’ll nail my colors to the mast now and say that I think this second hypothesis seems more likely. Without the help of the right brain we can’t hope to model the likely emotional response when we swear. Swearing, like joke telling, with no emotional model is like trying to navigate an unfamiliar room while blindfolded.

  This second hypothesis also helps to explain why patients with left-brain damage can do little but swear. The emotions that they’re experiencing are just as potent as before—possibly more so as they deal with the difficulties of living with a severe brain injury—and these emotions utilize what little speech remains as a way of making themselves heard. The remaining speech tends to comprise swear words because bad language makes use of so many parts of our brain. It doesn’t just depend on the more recently evolved parts of the human brain that allow us to use swearing in deliberate, inventive ways; it also makes use of the prehistoric parts that process our emotions. This distribution of labor means that swearing is a particularly tenacious facet of our language.

  Further studies suggest that we need the left and right hemispheres to coordinate their efforts when it comes to processing emotion. Your left hemisphere springs into action when you need to make sense of an emotion. Volunteers who were shown an emotive picture in their left visual field—which they saw in only the right hemisphere—became more emotional more quickly than when they were shown the same picture in their right visual field/left hemisphere. The right hemisphere allowed them to experience emotions directly, like the volunteers in the snake and spider experiments. However, when the volunteers were simply asked to say whether the pictures were emotive or neutral, they were able to answer more quickly when the images were presented to the right visual field (left hemisphere). The right hemisphere is acting as a rapid alarm system—“Here’s something emotional! Pay attention!”—but the left hemisphere comes in afterward to try to work out what kind of emotion we should be feeling.

  This hemispheric dominance even means that the left side of your face is more expressive than the right: not only do the features on the left side of the face tend to exaggerate your expression, they’re also more capable of expressing mixed emotions than the right side of the face. This isn’t ideal for sending essential social signals, however: the left side of a person’s face is seen in your right visual field when you’re talking to them face-to-face—sending signals to the more emotionally analytical left hemisphere. This costs us processing time but allows us to make better sense of what other people are feeling.

  Given that our right hemispheres do the rapid emotional processing, Dr. Tim Indersmitten and Professor Ruben Gur from the University of Pennsylvania hypothesized that we might actually make more sense of expressions on the right side of the face if these were presented for a very short period of time. They flashed up faces made of right or left sides of the face only, but because pictures of half a face look so strange, Indersmitten and Gur did something very cunning. They used “symmetrical chimeric faces”—photographs of faces where either the left or right half is duplicated and flipped to make a symmetrical face (Figure 2). Although the facial expressions were indeed more exaggerated in pictures made up of two left halves of the face, volunteers made far fewer mistakes when interpreting the emotions in the pictures made up of two right halves of the face, particularly when asked to make decisions in under six seconds.9

  Figure 2: Symmetrical chimeric faces

  If you stare at the photographs above for more than a few second
s, you’re likely to see the exaggerated expressions on the left as being much clearer. But in real life we have very little time to make sense of facial expressions with our left hemisphere—they tend to be fleeting and last a matter of a few seconds at most. It turns out that rapid glances at the right side of someone’s face (in our left visual field) go straight to the right side of our brains and allow us to make quicker, more accurate judgments about someone’s emotional state.

  But the lateralization of the brain—the division of labor between left and right hemispheres—isn’t the whole story when it comes to emotions and swearing.

  Introducing the Amygdala

  The fact that there is a left and right brain—and that one is responsible for reason and the other for emotion—might seem very familiar. It’s one of those folk neuroscience stories that turn up everywhere from self-help books to management training seminars. But, as we’ve just seen, for most of us the two sides of the brain work in concert to help us deal with both emotion and reason. And they don’t do it alone: there are other parts of the brain that have specific roles in either provoking or controlling the emotions that lead to swearing.

  Meet your amygdalae: an amygdala is a small, almond-shaped (and roughly almond-sized) node of the brain and you have one on each side. If you imagined a line going straight from ear to ear and another through each eye (try not to think too hard about Phineas Gage) the points where they intersect are where your amygdalae can be found.

  When we talked about the differences between the hemispheres, we were talking about developments that are quite recent in evolutionary terms. Some of the complex structures and processes we have in the cortex are unique to primates. Some language-specific areas are only found in humans. The amygdala, on the other hand, is found in all mammals, and there are similar structures in the brains of reptiles, fish, and birds. This means that the first, rudimentary amygdalae probably appeared around 250 million years ago, which is the last time we shared a common ancestor with the pigeon, the sturgeon, and the frog.

  Why are we carrying around such an ancient piece of hardware when we have such wonderfully sophisticated structures in the cortex? The answer is that those sophisticated structures couldn’t function without signals from these ancient little bumps located deep behind your ears. For something so small and so simple, the amygdala has a lot to do. We know that people with bigger amygdalae are better at making and keeping friends, for example, and amygdala size is a good indicator of whether or not you will suffer from depression. Our amygdalae are busy emotional relays that let the rest of our brains know when we’re fearful, anxious, or sexually aroused.

  The brain itself has no pain receptors, so if you’re unlucky enough to need brain surgery it will probably be carried out with local anesthetic for your scalp while you are wide awake. Far from being barbaric, keeping a person conscious during an operation has three advantages: first, general anesthetic occasionally kills people; it’s better avoided if possible. More important, the surgeon can use a small electrical current to send signals to parts of the brain before cutting. That might sound terrifying, but because the anatomy of our individual brains is as varied as the rest of our bodies, mapping out your particular brain’s anatomy is essential to ensure that the surgical team aren’t about to remove a vital part of it. Finally—and very usefully for science—observations of responses during surgery can provide information about the function of a living brain that we would otherwise have no way of gathering. This is why we know for certain what it’s like to speak to people whose amygdalae are being artificially stimulated.

  Two Scottish doctors—Edward Hitchcock and Valerie Cairns—had this conversation with a thirty-four-year-old man undergoing surgery:

  Hitchcock (who is operating on the patient): “How are you now?”

  Patient: “Just the same.”

  Then the patient’s amygdala is stimulated electronically.

  Patient: “I can hardly speak. **** . . . I just want to get the **** out of here.” [The swearing is redacted in the original paper so sadly I can’t share with you exactly what he said, though I can make a good guess.]

  Hitchcock: “That’s OK.” (Turns off stimulation.) “All right?”

  Patient: “Yes.”

  Hitchcock: “Did you feel angry?”

  Patient (surprised): “Aye, I did.”

  Hitchcock: “Do you feel that now?”

  Patient: “No, I don’t feel that now.”

  The noteworthy thing here is not so much that the patient swore while under the surgeon’s knife—a more rational response is hard to imagine!—but that his outburst was so sudden, short-lived and surprising even to him.10 We already know that the amygdala’s major function is to tell us when we are feeling especially emotional—and so the fact that its stimulation provoked swearing suggests not only that the amygdala is essential to the production of this type of language, but also that our emotions are inextricably bound up with our impulse to swear.

  From surgeries like these, scientists now know that removal of the amygdala reduces emotional responsiveness in general and aggression in particular. As a result, it is thought that the amygdala has a role to play in suppressing unwanted swearing, by acting as a sort of emotional traffic light and letting us know how and when it’s appropriate to express anger or fear. Signals from the amygdala can encourage us to let rip with bad language when we want to show anger but don’t fear reprisals, while different signals from the same small node can warn us when doing so might be dangerous. For such a small and primitive part of the brain, it’s capable of some complex processing.

  Swearing Is a Team Effort

  In the years since Phineas Gage’s accident we’ve learned that different parts of the brain do indeed have different functions—but we’re also starting to learn that none of them works entirely in isolation. So many parts of your brain are involved in swearing; either collaborating to help you produce swearing or working to suppress it when it isn’t wanted. The brain, unsurprisingly, is neither a trifle nor a blancmange. It is, though, a bit like an orchestra; a set of highly specialized elements working together to create what seems for all the world to be a unified whole.

  Swearing relies on sophisticated structures in both right and left hemispheres but it also draws on one of the most primitive parts of the early brain. What does this mean in practice? Well, if swearing were a simple, primal thing we wouldn’t expect to see so much involvement from the more recent, more complicated areas of the brain. However, if swearing weren’t so closely linked to our emotions, the amygdala wouldn’t have such an important role to play. And the fact that swearing is lost if we lose our ability to map the emotions of others shows us just how socially sophisticated we have to be in order to swear.

  It might seem like a contradiction—swearing is both primitive and sophisticated—but, as later chapters will show, this argument makes sense in the context of how humans evolved. We developed language as a means of getting along socially: the primates who told each other about the tiger they’d seen in the trees were much more likely to survive than the ones who didn’t. We also learned to communicate complex emotions like “I’m angry, back off!” and “I’m stressed, give me what I want!” Swearing is a powerful shortcut—an emotionally freighted part of language that lets us communicate complex things in an urgent way. What might have started out as simple displays of fear and aggression have become more elaborate as our societies, and our brains, have grown and changed. It’s no wonder, then, that when it comes to the brain, swearing is a sophisticated team effort.

  *2 * * * * *

  “Fuck! That hurts.”

  Pain and Swearing

  Dr. Richard Stephens, psychologist and author of Black Sheep: The Hidden Benefits of Being Bad, is infectiously enthusiastic about swearing. Every year he and his undergraduate students come up with more exciting experiments that are helping to untangle the relationship between pain, emotion, and swearing. “Swearing is a great vehicle for teaching
psychology. Everyone’s fascinated because everyone does it, but the experiments also show how important it is to have a control condition, that it’s important to have an evidence base, and the ways that logic and science work.” Dr. Stephens talks about his undergraduates at Keele University in Staffordshire as “a fantastic crop of students.” Surely he’s the university lecturer any aspiring psychology undergraduate would want? That rather depends on your attitude to sacrificing comfort for science: Dr. Stephens makes his students suffer for their results.

  For a very long time, conventional wisdom has said that swearing is not a useful response to pain. In fact, many psychologists believed that swearing would actually make pain feel worse thanks to a cognitive distortion known as catastrophizing. Cognitive distortions are exaggerated ways of thinking that make it hard to cope or to act rationally. When we catastrophize we leap to the conclusion that the bad thing that is currently happening is the absolute worst thing. We’re usually catastrophizing when we say things like, “This is terrible! I just can’t!” Swearing was thought to reinforce that feeling of helplessness.

  If swearing is part of a catastrophizing response, it would indeed make us less likely to cope well. Thinking “I just can’t!” doesn’t usually help us to be resilient in the face of pain and adversity. But this troubled Dr. Stephens, who wondered “why swearing, a supposedly maladaptive response to pain, is such a common pain response.” Like all of us, he’s hit his thumb with a hammer enough times to know that swearing seems to be an unavoidable response. So, with his students, he set out to find out whether swearing really does make pain feel worse.

  The first of these studies resulted in the paper that inspired this book. Somehow, he persuaded sixty-seven of his undergraduate students to stick their hands in ice-cold water for as long as they could stand, and do it not just once but twice, once while swearing and once not. (The Keele University School of Psychology Research Ethics Committee approved the study, which might be something to ponder if you’re choosing your future alma mater.) The thinking behind the experiment was as follows: if swearing is so maladaptive then the volunteers would give up much faster while they were cursing than if they were saying another, neutral word.