Speaking of Psychology: The psychology of swearing, with Richard Stephens, PhD

What’s your first reaction when someone cuts you off in traffic or you stub your toe? Do you let out a choice word or two? Richard Stephens, PhD, talks about the psychology of swearing, including his research on why swearing can increase people’s pain tolerance and strength during stressful or painful moments; how swearing is processed in the brain; and the increasing acceptance of swearing in daily life.

Richard Stephens, PhD, is a senior lecturer in psychology at Keele University in the U.K. He studies the psychology of emotion, including how swearing can help people withstand pain and improve strength and physical performance. His book, Black Sheep: The Hidden Benefits of Being Bad, won the 2017 British Psychological Society Book of the Year Award for popular science.

Kim Mills: What’s your first reaction when someone cuts you off in traffic? What about when you stub your toe or bash your finger with a hammer? If you’re like most of us, you probably let out a choice word or two. Swearing is a part of most people’s vocabulary, and in recent decades it’s become increasingly acceptable in movies, on television and in other places where it used to be forbidden. Opinions might vary on whether that’s a good thing, but here’s a point in favor of profanity: Psychologists who study swearing are finding out that using these taboo words may have some unexpected benefits for people’s mental and physical health.

So why do we swear? Can swearing during a stressful or painful moment actually make us feel better? Is it true that swearing is a sign of low intelligence or limited vocabulary? Do curse words exist in every language? Do people generally swear more than they used to in everyday life? And if they do, might swearing lose some of its power to heal as well as shock?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Richard Stevens, a senior lecturer in psychology at Keele University in the U.K. He studies the psychology of emotion, including how swearing can help people withstand pain and improve strength and physical performance. His book, Black Sheep: The Hidden Benefits of Being Bad, won the 2017 British Psychological Society Book of the Year Award for popular science. Dr. Stevens’s research has also been covered by media outlets including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Dr. Stevens, thank you for joining me today.

Richard Stephens, PhD: Hello, Kim, thanks for having me.

Mills: The fact that there is actual scientific research on swearing may be news to many of our listeners. What got you interested in this field of study?

Stephens: Yeah, curiosity, pure and simple. Curiosity. So things like doing DIY projects at home, and there was one particular incident when I hit my little finger with a hammer really, really hard and it really, really hurt. And I was on my own. There was no one around. But I remember repeating a swear word for about a minute or two. Things seemed to get better and I carried on. And the birth of our daughter as well. It was a long labor and the baby was actually breach but hadn’t been diagnosed as such. And towards the end as the contractions were coming on, my wife was in a lot of pain and was swearing quite a bit with the pain. And then when the contractions eased, she was a little bit embarrassed at having been doing that, with the growing number of medical staff with us. And then the contractions would come back and it would repeat. And what I remember very clearly was when my wife was saying, apologizing for the swearing, someone said, a midwife said, Don’t apologize, we hear this all the time. It’s a completely normal part of giving birth. So I thought, Oh, swearing and pain go together. The psychologist in me thought, Why does that happen?

Mills: For the purposes of your research, what constitutes swearing and is it different from cursing?

Stephens: I think they’re the same. There’s a slight language issue. We don’t really say “cursing” in the U.K., but my understanding is the terms are interchangeable. What I mean by swearing is the examples I’ve given where you stub your toe or something else happens. In the studies that we do, we have people repeat a swear word at a steady volume and pace, and that’s how we operationalize swearing. Some peer reviewers have questioned whether that is swearing, but I guess it’s a form of swearing and it mirrors certainly how I was behaving when I hit myself with the hammer. So that kind of encapsulates what we’re talking about.

Mills: Now, I’m a bit of a word nerd and I was surprised to learn a new one while prepping for our interview, lalochezia, it means the use of vulgar referral language to relieve stress or pain. The existence of an actual word seems to indicate that this is a pretty universal practice. Is that true?

Stephens: Yeah, I think it is. I mean, there’s an interesting story with the word, because the word existed before this swearing and pain research was coming out, but it was the use of a swear word to relieve stress was the extent of the definition. And you found this word in kind of medical dictionaries, but it has been extended since our research came out to include stress and pain. I think any language that has swearing, probably people will very quickly think it’s a good idea to swear when you’re in pain. One of the things I’ve always said is the research that I’ve done, it’s sort of confirming what everybody already knows in a way, but at least it is confirming that swearing has some benefit and then we’re trying to uncover how psychologically, what’s the mechanism for that.

Mills: You’ve done research into the benefits, so can you tell the listeners what have you found? I mean, what’s good about swearing?

Stephens: Yeah, so we started off with this very applied question of why do people swear when they’re in pain? Does swearing help people when they’re in pain? And to research that it’s kind of lab-based research. We need to introduce a pain stimulus that’s painful but not harmful. And I’ve exclusively used ice-cold water in the studies that I’ve run because that’s quite a nice cheap way to operationalize that. Putting your hand in ice-cold water—provided you don’t have certain underlying medical conditions—is painful but not harmful. So we’ve had people basically put their hand in ice-cold water, hold it there for as long as they can and repeat either a swear word of their choice or a neutral word, which we’ve tended to use a word to describe a table, which is something my students came up with years ago. And we have a behavioral measure of pain tolerance, which is how long does the hand stay in the water for? Keep your hand in the water for as long as you can. Basically across quite a number of studies now we’ve shown that people will keep their hands in the water longer when they’re repeating the swear word.

Mills: What if they yell a word like “fudge,” right, which is close to the F word, but not actually it. Does that have any effect?

Stephens: Yeah, we’ve got some unpublished data—I really need to get on and publish this study—but you get an intermediate effect for a kind of intermediate swear word, which I guess you might expect, because what we presume is happening is if someone says fudge, they’re somewhat activating schema linked to swearing, but not as fully as if they said the full word. And so they get partial benefits from it. It sort of leads me to theorizing about how swearing might work. It’s almost like I think swearing is a double taboo actually. So a swear word is taboo in so much as the sentiment behind the word, the semantics of the word are taboo, the kind of things that we have swear words for are usually taboo, to do with sex or bodily functions and so on. But also the word itself is taboo as well. The word, the swear words themselves, divorced from their meaning, I think carry additional taboo. So it’s almost like with a partial swear word or a mild swear word, you are activating part of that double taboo, but not all of it. I really need to get on and do that study properly and get that out there, but that’s a work in progress.

Mills: You’ve also looked at how swearing affects strength. What have you found in your research?

Stephens: The story behind that was with the swearing and pain stuff. We were finding that as well as swearing helping you keep your hand in the ice-cold water for longer, there was accompanying psychophysiological effects of increased heart rate, all of which is consistent with the emotional aspect of swearing, bringing about a certain degree of activation of autonomic nervous system activity or the fight or flight response. And the obvious question then is if swearing activates the fight or flight response, swearing should make you stronger because fight or flight adrenaline and all that sort of thing.

So that was the starting point. So we’ve run a couple of studies now, maybe three or four actually where we’ve looked at swearing and physical performance. The puzzling thing with those studies is we’ve shown that swearing benefits physical task performance, we’ve had people on an exercise bike task where they have to cycle for 30 seconds on a stationary bike against a very large load. It’s called the Wingate test, and people perform that with greater power when they’re repeating the swear word compared to the neutral word. We’ve also shown for kind a hand grip task, which is—it’s called a hand grip dynamometer, and it’s like a little a handheld device. The stronger you grip it, the more a little needle goes round on a dial, people will grip that more strongly repeating a swear word than a neutral word.

And then when COVID came along and we had to pivot to online, we had people doing a chair pushup, which is basically—I’ll do it now while I’m talking. You put your hands underneath your thighs and then you lift your body weight up and feet off the floor and support your body weight on your arms as I’m doing now, and hold that position for as long as you can. And all three of those tasks we’ve shown that people will perform those tasks either with greater strength or for longer when they’re repeating a swear word. But puzzlingly in the lab-based studies, we didn’t see the psychophysiological reaction that we predicted would be the cause of that effect. So we found the effect, but for some other cause, which has actually been quite interesting because that sends us down the path of exploring more psychological mechanisms rather than psychophysiological mechanisms to explain how it all works.

Mills: Does it matter which swear word a person uses? Are some more potent than others?

Stephens: More than likely, yes, but limited research findings to back that up. I remember you asked me earlier about fudge and we’ve done research with kind of mild swear words compared with stronger swear words to see a dose effect response. And the data suggest—but we’ve never got those published, so that’s not out there in the peer review world, so we can’t make too much claim on that. But we mostly say to people, choose your own swear word. And the variety is interesting that comes back with that because it probably is personal, one person’s kind of strong swear word is it’s a personal history that we have with these words. However, when we have run studies where we said use the F word, that seems to work pretty well and probably the majority of people choose that word anyway.

Mills: What about hand gestures—flipping the bird—does that have the same effect as saying the word that it represents out loud?

Stephens: I ran a study a few years ago where we looked at people doing the middle finger gesture rather than saying swear word, and that showed inconclusive rules. This was a pain study and that study showed inconclusive results, so there was no clear benefit of a sign like that rather than a swear word. Now I think some more research has come out since, but I’m afraid I’m not across that. So I’m not sure exactly what the situation is with what we know about hand gestures. There’s a quote about swearing perhaps being the foundation of civilization because it enabled a form of non-physical violence to be inflicted that maybe serves some kind of—without escalating things too much.

Mills: Do you have to say the words out loud or can you just think them really hard to yourself? Does that make a difference?

Stephens: Again, probably yes, it probably does make a difference, but we have not done studies where we have people thinking the words, so we haven’t got a definitive research answer for that. One of the issues with getting people to think things is we are not completely sure if they’re definitely doing what we ask. I suspect thinking would have a similar effect, but a milder one. But that’s useful, isn’t it? Because that means in certain situations where to say a swear word might not be a great idea. We can think of swear word. That’s free and it might help.

Mills: What’s happening physiologically when somebody swears and their pain tolerance increases or their strength increases? What is going on in the body and in the brain?

Stephens: There is evidence out there that the emotional aspect of swearing elicits a psychophysiological response, basically an autonomic nervous system response and to what we call the fight or flight response, and not just in my lab. Other labs have showed things like skin conductance, which is how much sweat you have on your skin, correlates with how activated our autonomic nervous system or our fight or flight response is. And previous studies have shown that skin conductance is raised with swearing, linked to the emotional aspect of it. So part of it is autonomic arousal, but like I say, we’ve also more recently shown swearing effects in the absence of that. So there are other interesting things happening in the brain, I think besides the autonomic arousal.

Mills: Are there other potential benefits of swearing? Are there other areas you’re looking into?

Stephens: What we’re looking at at the moment is trying to understand the psychology behind the sort of benefits that we’ve seen so far, like the benefit for pain and the benefit for physical activity and exploring more into psychological domain. And that’s very much where the effort is now and where we’re moving towards is, something to do with swearing seems to make us disinhibited, seems to be a way of overthrowing societal constraints temporarily.

So the recent studies have shown bits of evidence here and there that are supporting this state of disinhibition hypothesis for swearing, and that’s a bit like alcohol. Alcohol makes us disinhibited. So any situation where being disinhibited can be advantageous, I think theoretically swearing might be able to help us. So for example, public speaking, that’s kind of a moment when we can feel very inhibited and socially evaluated. Some kind of swearing warmup routine might very well help with that.

I think there’s really something to this idea of disinhibition. So for example, years and years ago there used to be a television show in the U.K. called Top of the Pops, which was recorded once a week and all of the latest chart-topping acts would be performing in the studio in front of a live audience. And I was lucky enough to get tickets years and years ago. When you turn up as the audience, there’s a warmup guy, and so you turn up and the warmup guy is, Okay, everybody, how are you doing tonight? And everyone goes, Okay. And then they go, No, that’s not loud enough. How are you doing tonight? And after about 10 minutes you’ve transformed to, How are you doing? Yeah, I’m fantastic. I’m having an amazing time.

So I think there’s something about inhibition and disinhibition that’s quite powerful in terms of our psychology, and I think the evidence that I’m gathering I think is supporting the idea that swearing can push us to being in a more disinhibited state. And I think that can have benefits, the benefits we’ve shown so far, but perhaps other ones as well.

Mills: I’m wondering how swearing relates to other parts of language. Does our brain process profanity in the same way? I mean, I’ve read that profanity exists in a very specific part of the brain. Is there any truth to that?

Stephens: I think swearing is a form of language that is handled differently by the brain. I mean, going back, if you read Steven Pinker’s book, The Stuff of Thought has a really nice chapter on swearing that talks about this stuff in quite an interesting way. So there is evidence that some swearing in some ways can be kind of stereotypical language, almost like song lyrics that we might have learned or poetry might have learned, or if you’re religious prayers that you might know and be able to recite. And there is various evidence from sort neuropsychological case studies, people with brain damage, that while the regular brain language areas in the left hemisphere like kind of Broca’s area, called these sort of left cortical brain areas that are heavily involved with language, usually they can be damaged and a person can have difficulties with language and yes, still be able to swear fluently, which suggests that language, that it’s organized differently in the brain. You’ve also got people with Tourette’s, only around 50% of people with Tourette’s have coprolalia, which is the swearing tick that is so well known. But there is evidence that people with Tourette’s have reduced brain volumes of a region called the basal ganglia, which again are well away from the usual language areas, and yet it has this effect on language via that illness. So, yeah, there’s a few bits of evidence around swearing being a different form of language and handled differently, which I guess as a psychologist makes it interesting to study.

Mills: For bilingual people, does swearing in a second language have the same effects as swearing in their first language?

Stephens: Depends. Okay, if you become very, very fluent in a second language, then the answer is yes. But for people who have learned a second language relatively recently, the evidence is that swearing is processed very differently in that second language. So we still don’t know, we call it the power of swearing. We still don’t really properly know where the power of swearing comes from. It’s something to do with learning that there are these taboo words as you’re growing up, seeing them deployed in certain situations, perhaps emotionally charged situations. There’s something about our relationship with swearing as we grow up that gives the words their power. And obviously you don’t get that usually with a second language because with a second language. I mean, I think quite often it’s the first words people learn in a second language because it’s kind of fun, isn’t it, to find out what the swear words are. But you say, Okay, that’s a swear word. I’ll have to remember that. That’s completely different to the way swear words you’ve grown up with are almost, the association with emotion is so much stronger. So, yeah, so we quite often have in the U.K.—I’m a football, soccer, fan and we have lots of players from Europe and beyond for whom English is a second language and frequently they’ll drop a swear word into a televised interview because for them it’s just a word they’ve learned and that they use regularly. It doesn’t have that same gravitas.

Mills: Which brings me to this idea, which is that swearing seems to be more permissible in places than it used to be and probably more prevalent in people’s everyday language. I mean, I’ve certainly noticed that in my lifetime. As swearing becomes more common, does it lose its power?

Stephens: We have done some research in my lab that speaks to that and others have as well that replicates the similar effects. So basically we ran a version of the swearing and pain study where we asked people additionally, how often do you swear in everyday life? And we managed to get an estimate of daily number of swear wears. Obviously it’s going to be a pretty rough estimate, it’s a very hard thing to put a number on when asked, but presumably there’s some bearing with reality. Anyway, we found that people who swore more often in everyday life got much less benefit of swearing in one of our swearing and pain studies compared with people that swore less often in everyday life. And that kind of makes sense because we know that people habituate to stimulate if you like, and it’s a fairly fundamental idea in and perception and attention.

We have a limited attention system, so we can’t attend to absolutely everything that’s happening at once. So we quickly habituate to the things that aren’t really changing and aren’t so important right now, and we concentrate on where things are happening. Why often say at this point is I’m sitting down on a chair, if I think about it, I can feel my body on the chair. Whereas a minute ago I wasn’t thinking about that at all because I was concentrating on the conversation. That’s an example of habitation. I had habituated to that aspect of where my body is in space and what it’s touching. So we’ve shown in my research that people get a lesser benefit from swearing if they swear more often, and that presumably would happen across the board. If swearing is a more frequently encountered phenomenon for everybody, then it’s less of a big deal and it’s not going to have the same effect, which suggests that I agree that swearing does seem to be more prevalent and you see the printed swear words in the newspapers now that you probably didn’t 20 years ago.

Even the fact we’re having this conversation, in fact, I started this research around about 2007 and nobody was researching swearing then because it was just becoming an acceptable level of taboo that that could happen. Now we have networks of swearing researchers. I was lucky enough to be in Helsinki in January at a swearing research conference with academics from all over who are interested. So times do change. But yes, you would predict that the more often we come across swearing, then it’s going to have less of an effect. But we’d also predict that language evolves and if the current swear words, we’re becoming more comfortable with them, presumably some other type of swear word is going to evolve to fulfill this function that swear words were invented to fulfill.

Mills: Some people say that using a lot of profanity is a sign of low intelligence or at least limited vocabulary. Is that true or is that just a stereotype?

Stephens: I think it’s more or less a stereotype, but there is a grain of truth in it. We’ve all come across people who swear every second or third word in what they say, and it’s not particularly creative or not particularly adding much to the meaning that’s being communicated. So there’s a guy, Timothy Jay, has been researching for swearing longer than I have. He’s based in Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and he came up with this really fantastic scale or measuring device called the swearing fluency task. So there already exist word fluency tasks that are used routinely by neuropsychologists, and it’ll be something like, How many words can you think of in 1 minute, beginning with a letter A? And the participant has to think of as many words as they can, different words beginning the letter A. Anyway, Timothy Jay came up with the swearing version of that task. How many swear words can you think of in 1 minute?

Okay. Timothy ran a study whereby participants completed both the standard version of the task, so we got an idea of their verbal fluency, which correlates with IQ, by the way. A high verbal fluency correlates with a high IQ with their swearing, verbal fluency. And guess what? Positive correlation. People with the highest vocabulary generally have a higher vocabulary of swear words. So it’s kind of nuanced, but swearing, so swearing in and of itself is not a sign of low IQ and inarticulateness.

Mills: What is the connection, if any, between swearing and honesty? I think that’s also something you’ve looked at.

Stephens: Yeah, I’ve not researched this personally, but I’ve talked about it occasionally and I’ve read some of the studies. So there’s basically an idea out there that, I mean, probably your gut says someone swearing is dishonest because swearing is bad and bad is associated with dishonesty and so on. So that might be your gut reaction. Whereas if you take a second appraisal, a person who’s swearing are they not giving you the unfiltered, this is me honest version of things. So it goes two ways. So there is some research out there linking swearing frequency with honesty, and basically they showed that people who swear more frequently scored higher on some kind of honesty rating. So yeah, quite interesting.

Mills: Well, of course in court they always make you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth got to be some connection between honesty and swearing.

Stephens: I mean, I think there is a connection there because the expression swearing comes from to swear an oath and it would’ve been to swear an oath on God, a religious oath originally. And of course, that’s exactly what a person swearing in court is doing.

Mills: So just to wrap up, what are the big questions that you’re still trying to answer?

Stephens: Yeah, so this link between swearing and state disinhibition is one of the big questions. I think there’s a strong case that this is an important mechanism in how swearing confers the benefits that it does. We were really excited to run an EEG study last year that came out this January, and we measured an EEG is like brain electrical activity. And from studies with alcohol, there’s an EEG signal linked to disinhibition that we know from researching alcohol. It’s called error related negativity. And basically when you’re doing a task, if you make a mistake, it’s almost like, I made a mistake. It’s like this kind of response that we have, this neural response. And our prediction was that we should see a reduced error related negativity signal in EEG in a swearing condition compared to a neutral word condition because that’s linked to state disinhibition.

Of course, we ran the study and we didn’t find the predicted effects. That’s science. The study was published in January. We did show some self-report measures linked to state inhibition that hadn’t been used before, showed a relationship to swearing, showed an effect with swearing. So like I say, partially found that. So it’d be nice to do some more EEG work, perhaps look at some different signals, but I think the state inhibition work is really interesting and potentially really useful.

Another strand of work is looking at this question of where does the power of swearing come from? We’ve done a bit of work collecting people’s personal history of swearing, like recollections of swearing and trying to analyze those. So we can talk about the soap and water hypothesis for where swearing gets its power from the idea that as a child you swear, an adult admonishes you for swearing, perhaps going as far as washing your mouth out with soap and water and the trauma of that, the shame of that or whatever imbues swearing with power.

But in one of the only surveys done on that question, only less than half the participants could recall any such incident from their childhood. So it suggests that that’s probably a stereotype and there’s other more nuanced ways that the power of swearing comes about. So that’s a research agenda. And the other one I’ve already mentioned is trying to find this dose response effect to understand whether there is this double taboo hypothesis. If we have an intermediate, so we have the full-on F word and a neutral word, so double taboo for the F word. If we have a single taboo, like a mild swear word perhaps, or just a taboo idea like going to the toilet for example, without any swear words attached to it, how would that play? So that would be interesting, theoretically interesting to pursue as well. So those are the things on the agenda.

Mills: Dr. Stevens, I want to thank you for joining me today. I’m sure I’ll be thinking of you the next time I go to the gym.

Stephens: Give it a go. It might help. 

Mills: I will. 

You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please follow us and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.