Swearing #$%!-ing eases emotional pain: study

Swearing when you bang your finger with a hammer has been shown to have pain-killing impact. Cursing a blue streak over emotional pain (from a breakup, say) is good for what ails you too, according to a small but intriguing New Zealand study. It is said to be the first investigation of its kind.

Michael Philipp, who teaches at Massey University’s School of Psychology, split 70 subjects into two groups to test the Pain Overlap Theory. It hypothesizes that physical and emotional pain share the same root processing system.

Participants were instructed to write about a distressing social event in order to stir up a corresponding feeling, and then were told to say a curse word or a non-curse word. “The results suggest that socially distressed participants who swore out loud experienced less social pain than those who did not,” noted Philipp, whose study is published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. They also experienced less sensitivity to physical pain.

The reason why f-bombs and such have a palliative effect? They distract the person in pain and reduce the intensity of the ache. But the researcher cautions that cursing isn’t a fix for all our negative feels. It can’t relieve the deep emotional pain of grieving and other serious issues. Moreover, swearing constantly over every feels can weaken its cathartic impact.

Swear wisely, people!