by Emma Byrne
To make it a fair test, the students were allowed only one swear word and one neutral word and the order of the swearing and neutral immersions was randomized. Dr. Stephens asked them for five words they would use if they dropped a hammer on their thumb and five words to describe a table. Then he took the first swear word that appeared in the first list and its counterpart from the second list. When I did the experiment, my words were: “arrgh, no, fuck, bugger, shit” and “flat, wooden, sturdy, shiny, useful” which meant saying “fuck” in one trial and “sturdy” in the other.
The results could best be summarized by the phrase “Maladaptive, my ass!” It turned out that, when they were swearing, the intrepid volunteers could keep their hands in the water nearly half as long again as when they used their table-based adjectives. Not only that, while they were swearing the volunteers’ heart rates went up and their perception of pain went down: in other words, the volunteers experienced less pain while swearing.1
It’s an easy experiment to try for yourself at home, or at a party if you have the right kind of friends. All you need is a bowl of ice water and a stopwatch. So why wasn’t this experiment done soon after the invention of the ice cube?
“Pain used to be thought of as a purely biological phenomenon, but actually pain is very much psychological. The same level of injury will hurt more or less in different circumstances,” says Dr. Stephens. We know, for example, that if male volunteers are asked to rate how painful a stimulus is, most of them will say it hurts less if the person collecting the data is a woman.2 Pain isn’t a simple relationship between the intensity of a stimulus and the severity of your response. Circumstances, your personality, your mood, even the experience of previous pain all affect the way we experience a physical hurt.
Now that we know how much influence our thoughts, feelings, and experiences have on our perception of pain, psychologists have started to look at ways of influencing our brains to make pain easier to tolerate. Dr. Stephens’s study shows that swearing is affecting the volunteers’ perception of pain, but how? Is it a simple distraction? Does swearing make us feel stronger? Does it simply let us vent some of our feelings? To find out how it helps, Dr. Stephens and other researchers have started to look at the phenomenon in detail. What we’re learning about the link between pain and the emotions, and between our bodies and our words, is fascinating.
What Does Swearing Do to the Brain?
One of the most exciting things about the original ice-water study is that people don’t just say that pain is less painful when they swear, nor do they simply experience it as easier to bear. Swearing seems to change something in their bodies. As noted, Dr. Stephens’s study showed that the volunteers’ heart rates went up while swearing, compared with the non-swearing trials. An increase in heart rate is a sure sign of our emotions being involved.
In psychology experiments, showing people swear words, or having them listen to some swearing, has been used for a long time as a way of making people experience strong feelings, but it’s only in the last eight years or so that psychologists have started to study the effect of swearing on the volunteer by having them do the swearing themselves. Dr. Stephens thought that the likely effect on our emotions made swearing an excellent candidate for an analgesic. He has a theory that swearing does something to the emotions that makes pain easier to stand and that the two most likely candidates are fear and aggression.
We know that fear can act as a painkiller. Dr. Jamie Rhudy and his colleagues at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, have been studying the effect of emotion on pain for several years. In one experiment the volunteers were told that they would, might, or would not receive mild electric shocks during the experiment. (I don’t know about you, but if I volunteered for a psychology experiment and the first thing the experimenter said was, “You will not receive any electrical stimulations,” I’d be deeply suspicious.)
None of the volunteers got off lightly, though. All three groups were asked to keep one finger close to a “radiant heat source” (a high-powered projector bulb) for about 20 percent longer than was comfortable. The volunteers who had simply been threatened with the shocks reported that the exposure to the heat source felt less painful than those who had been told they wouldn’t be shocked.3 What’s more, the volunteers who actually were shocked reported that the pain from the bulb was even less intense than those who’d merely had the prospect of electric shocks hanging over them.
What could be going on here? Might the shocks have numbed the pain? Dr. Rhudy had the shocked group carry out the heat tolerance test with the unshocked hand in order to rule out any localized numbing effect from the electrical current. The results were the same. Indeed, as we’ll see later in this chapter, although pain can have an overall numbing effect, it has to be of limb-breaking severity to do so.4 Dr. Rhudy concluded that the anticipation of pain—a state of fear—is enough to make us preempt the sensation and reduce its apparent strength. In short, the more pain we fear, the less pain we feel.
However, this runs counter to the numerous other studies that suggest that anticipation and fear actually increase your subjective experience of pain. Because it’s not ethical to ask people to volunteer to be tortured, there aren’t many experiments about the anticipation and experience of extreme pain. Fortunately for the research community, there is one group of people who are pretty much guaranteed to be in a significant amount of pain at some approximately known date in the future, many of them choosing to accept little or no pain relief. Pregnant women make excellent study candidates.
From them, we now know that one of the strongest predictors of how painful a woman will find labor and childbirth is the extent to which they are afraid that it will hurt.5 Fear of childbirth can also make women less resilient to pain that is unrelated to the birth. In the ice-water experiment, women who are anticipating a painful delivery tend to remove their hands from ice water faster than those who are confident that everything will go well.6 That’s why, at the time of writing, I’m actively ignoring horror stories about childbirth, to the extent of putting my hands over my ears and singing, “Lalalala I can’t hear you.” With just a few weeks to go until the birth of my first child I’m not being rude—it’s evidence-based pain management.*
According to the experience of pregnant women at least, then, fear makes pain more painful, as should priming with a mild pain, which appeared to contradict Dr. Rhudy’s results. Dr. Rhudy revisited his study and, while he didn’t go to the extent of recalling his original volunteers, he did pay more attention in future research to the range of emotions caused by both pain and the threat of it. One conclusion he reached was: “Our laboratory has found that procedures intended to elicit fear also elicit anger.”7 So, shocking people also makes them angry? That’s definitely something to keep in mind when designing an experiment that involves electricity.
I’m being a little facetious, I know, but this result highlights one of the dangers of trying to study emotional responses. Emotions come not as single spies but in battalions. Inducing one pure emotion in a person is impossible. How can we study the emotional effect of swearing when emotions are so difficult to unravel? Psychologists classify emotions along two axes: valence and arousal. Valence simply refers to how pleasurable (or not) a feeling is. Happiness scores highly for valence, misery has low valence. Arousal is a measure of how strong a feeling is, regardless of whether or not it is pleasant. So excitement and fury are both high arousal, while boredom and contentment are both low.
When studying the effect of swearing, Dr. Stephens doesn’t assume that swearing has induced a particular emotional state in all of his volunteers. Instead he, like many other psychologists, quantifies the degree of each volunteer’s arousal using their heart rate and galvanic skin response (roughly speaking, a measure of how sweaty-palmed you are; researchers attach small electrodes to volunteers’ fingertips. These detect levels of stress, fear, anxiety, or excitement).
In the first of the ice-water experiments, Dr. Stephe
ns showed that swearing really did change the volunteers’ arousal levels. “As well as making the ice water feel less painful, we also showed that swearing causes effects on various parts of the body. It does increase heart rate: it seems to cause the fight-or-flight response. So if we think that swearing can help with pain because it causes emotional arousal, then what about doing something that just causes emotional arousal?”
Dr. Stephens designed a particularly cunning experiment with one of his undergraduates, Claire Allsop.8 This study was so neatly devised that she won a prestigious award from the British Psychological Society for it. Ms. Allsop wanted to know whether she could increase pain tolerance by making someone feel more aggressive. If pain tolerance depends on “innate” aggression then it shouldn’t be possible to induce mild-mannered people to suffer for longer. But if, as the swearing study showed, the same person can stand far greater levels of pain when swearing than when not, might swearing actually cause aggression levels to rise, increase arousal, and help us deal with pain that way?
She followed in her mentor’s footsteps, and managed to persuade forty of her fellow undergraduates to repeat the ice-water test.† “We were looking at things we could do in the lab and one easy way is to have them play a first-person shooter game,” explains Dr. Stephens. In fact, each of her volunteers played either a first-person shooter—one of those video games where you run around trying to kill people before they kill you—or a golf game. In order to test exactly how the game had affected the volunteers, Miss Allsop then had them fill in a hostility questionnaire where they rated themselves from 1 to 5 against adjectives like explosive, irritable, calm, or kindly. Finally, she used a very clever test to see how aggressively primed the students were. The test is a kind of solitary hangman—she showed the volunteers prompts like “explo_e” or “_ight.” Those who responded with “explode” and “fight” she classified as feeling more aggressive than those who thought of “explore” or “light.”
The students scored consistently higher on the aggression measures when they played the shoot-’em-up rather than the golf game, rating themselves as more hostile on the questionnaire and coming up with more violent imagery in the solo hangman challenge. But did it do anything for their pain?
“We basically showed the same pattern of effect as we did for swearing: they could tolerate [the ice water] longer, and said they perceived it as less painful, and they also showed a rise in heart rate.” After the golf game the male students could immerse their hands for an average of 117 seconds, females an average of 106 seconds. After shooting people, those times jumped to 195 seconds for the men and 174 seconds for the women. That’s around three minutes. If you’re in any doubt whether or not that’s a noble feat I defy you to try it. We did the same experiment in our laboratory (somewhat informally), comparing swearing with positive affirmations like, “Emma, you can do it.” I couldn’t. I’ve lost my notes, but I think I lasted all of ninety seconds—much shorter than my swearing best, which was just over three minutes.
Does this mean that people who are inherently aggressive are more likely to handle pain better? To test this, as part of her undergraduate research Dr. Kristin Neil and her colleagues at the University of Georgia looked at the relationship between how aggressive someone is and how much pain they can stand. She asked seventy-four male undergraduates to take part in a set of “reaction-time contests,” ostensibly because she wanted to check how fast the students could press a button. But the real reason was rather different.
In Dr. Neil’s lab, volunteers were given “reaction buttons” to press. They were told to imagine themselves like gunslingers in a western—they had to be faster than their (unseen) opponent at pressing the button after a cue in order to win the game. She also introduced an interesting wrinkle. Next to the reaction button was a punishment button. If their opponent was thought to be cheating, or even if the volunteer was getting frustrated at losing and wanted to even up the odds, the punishment button would administer an electric shock for as long as it was pressed. The intensity of the shock could be decided by the volunteer. In order to give the volunteers some idea of just how much punishment they would be meting out, Dr. Neil gave them all a series of shocks before the game began, increasing the level until the volunteers asked her to stop.
All was not as it seemed, however. The opponent in the game was nothing more than a simple script on a computer that would let the volunteer win a certain percentage of “gunfights.” The punishment button merely recorded the intensity level and how soon, how often, and how long the volunteer pressed it. Of course, the real experiment had begun long before the game started. With those initial shocks, Dr. Neil was covertly collecting data to see how much pain each volunteer could tolerate.
All this deception might seem unethical, but it’s common practice when designing psychology experiments. Humans are social animals; we are strongly conditioned to be cooperative and to behave in ways we think are expected of us. If a volunteer expects to be tested on something, they will do their best to behave in the way that they think an ideal subject would behave, even going so far as to underperform if that’s what they think the experimenter wants to see. This subconscious desire to please can throw results off very badly, so Dr. Neil had to counter little white lies with bigger white lies. While her volunteers were distracted by the idea of doing a good job on the reaction-time experiment she could collect the data she really needed.
What she wanted to know was whether there is a correlation between a person’s pain threshold and how soon, how hard, and how often they punish their opponents. The results are indisputable: the more pain a volunteer was able to take before the trial, the more likely they were to shock sooner, more often, at higher voltage and even to lean on the button for longer than their less pain-tolerant fellows.
Why should that be the case? Do the less pain-tolerant volunteers have greater empathy for their “victim,” or is there something about the most aggressive players’ brains that allows them to suck up more discomfort? Dr. Neil’s experiment doesn’t look at this directly, but by comparing the results she got with the results that Clare Allsop and Richard Stephens uncovered, we can build some hypotheses.
We know that our level of aggression at any given moment is a combination of the aggressive elements of our personality (known as trait aggression) and our reaction to present circumstances (state aggression). Dr. Neil’s experiment seems to suggest that individuals with high trait aggression are better at withstanding pain, but the more aggressive volunteers might also have been having very bad days: the experiment doesn’t disentangle state and trait aggression explicitly. What’s so great about the Allsop and Stephens study is that it shows how easily we can all manipulate our emotions as a means of managing pain. Does that mean that swearing—or shoot-’em-ups—should be available on prescription?
Is All Swearing Equally Good at Killing Pain?
The good news is that swearing and shoot-’em-ups seem to work for everyone that Dr. Stephens has studied. Psychologists classify people into those who tend to express their anger a lot (“anger-out” people) and those who sit on it (“anger-in” people.) At first Dr. Stephens suspected that swearing might only work for people who were comfortable with the idea of swearing, or who did a lot of swearing in their everyday lives. “You might think that swearing would be more effective in anger-out people than anger-in people because for anger-out people you’re giving them an outlet they’re used to using whereas for anger-in people it’s maybe the opposite of what they might want to do.” He set up an experiment to test this, asking people to rate how likely they were to swear when they were angry, but the results surprised him: “Actually it didn’t make a difference; swearing worked equally well for both types of people. That’s the thing about science: sometimes you get a negative result.”
There are other variations that Dr. Stephens and his students have tested. “When the first paper came out, the question that most people seemed to ask was, ‘Does it ma
tter how much I swear in everyday life?’” The first study that looked at this phenomenon seemed to suggest that there was an effect: swearing helped all the volunteers, but the extra tolerance time it bought the frequent swearers was a lot more limited than the relief that was felt by infrequent swearers.9 But the key to scientific discovery is repeatability, and Dr. Stephens says that follow-up studies haven’t replicated this effect.
The type of swearing might make a difference, though. What about “minced oaths”—those socially palatable versions of swearing we trot out when we might be overheard? Do these milder types of naughty language work as well when we want to get our aggression rates up? It seems not: stronger swear words are stronger painkillers.
“My students tried to see if there was a dose response for swearing,” says Dr. Stephens. Two students ran a variant of the same experiment in two consecutive years that looked at the relationship between the strength of the language and the effect on pain. One year a student compared saying “fuck,” “bum,” or a neutral word. The following year another student did the same experiment but thought that “bum” was too mild and so decided to use “shit” instead. In both experiments, “fuck” gave the greatest relief, while “bum” and “shit” gave less, though more than using a neutral word. While the study was a classroom-based curiosity that hasn’t been published, it does sound like a promising avenue for further research, as well as making for an entertaining talk: “I love putting that slide up in presentations because I get to say the word ‘bum,’ which is quite fun.”