Scientists say that swearing is not a sign of less intelligence, but rather of more

When someone uses obscene or taboo language, or swears, it’s often seen as a sign that they don’t have a big vocabulary, can’t say what they mean in a less offensive way, or aren’t very smart.

Studies, on the other hand, have shown that swearing may be a sign of a more intelligent use of language, not less.

Even though swearing can become a habit, we choose to swear in different situations and for different reasons, such as for linguistic effect, to show how we feel, to get a laugh, or even to be intentionally mean.

Psychologists who study when and why people swear try to get past the idea that swearing is the language of idiots and people who can’t read or write.

In fact, psychologists from Marist College did a study that found links between how well a person speaks English and how well they swear.

The first, verbal fluency, can be measured by asking volunteers to think of as many words starting with a certain letter of the alphabet as they can in 1 minute.

Most of the time, people with better language skills can think of more examples in the time given. The researchers made the swearing fluency task based on this method. Volunteers are asked to write down as many swear words as they can think of in one minute.

By looking at how well people did on both the verbal fluency test and the swearing fluency test, it was found that people who did well on the verbal fluency test also did well on the swearing fluency test. The people who did the worst on the verbal fluency test also did badly on the swearing task.

This shows that swearing isn’t just a sign of not knowing how to use language well, not having a big vocabulary, or being dumb.

Instead, swearing seems to be a part of language that a well-spoken person can use to communicate as effectively as possible. And actually, swearing is used for more than just talking.

Natural pain relief

For our research, we had volunteers hold their hand in ice water for as long as they could while repeating a swear word.

The same group of people did the iced water test again, but this time they repeated a neutral word instead of a swear word. The heart rates of both groups of people were watched.

We found that people who swore could handle the pain of the ice-cold water longer, thought it hurt less, and had a higher heart rate rise than people who repeated a neutral word.

This suggests that swearing made them feel bad and turned on their “fight or flight” response, which is a natural defense mechanism that not only releases adrenaline and speeds up the heart rate, but also makes them feel less pain. This is called “stress-induced analgesia.”

This study was started because when my daughter was born, my wife swore a lot during painful contractions. Surprisingly, the midwives didn’t seem to care. They told us that swearing is normal and common during childbirth, maybe for the same reasons as our iced water study.

Emotional connection on both sides

We wanted to learn more about how emotions and swearing are linked. In our most recent study, we wanted to find out the opposite of what the first study found. Instead of looking at whether swearing made the speaker feel angry, we wanted to see if anger could make the speaker swear more often.

In the lab, people were asked to play a first-person shooter video game to make them feel more emotional. During the ten minutes they played, they looked around a virtual world and fought and shot at different enemies.

We found that this was an effective way to get people angry, because the people who did it said they felt more angry than those who played a golf video game.

Next, the participants did the task about how often they could swear. As expected, the people who played the shooting game could think of more swear words than those who played the golf game.

This shows that swearing and feeling are connected in two ways. The iced water study showed that swearing can not only make people feel bad, but that feeling bad can also help people swear more easily.

This group of studies shows that swearing is about more than just being rude or not having good verbal hygiene. Cussing is a part of language, which is a sophisticated set of tools.

Not surprisingly, a lot of the last words of pilots who died in plane crashes and were recorded on the “black box” are swear words. And this brings up an important point: swearing must be important if it comes up so often in life-and-death situations.

In reality, the number of swear words you know is related to the number of words you know in general, and swearing is inextricably linked to feeling and expressing feelings and emotions.