Each year in the June the Doctoral and Researcher College at the University of Reading holds a one-day conference to promote the work being undertaken by the PhD students at the University. The day is open to all students and staff, as well as the general public and, across the day, researchers boil down their doctoral work via poster presentations, three-minute theses, bed-time stories, photographs, and raps.
Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn
This year Chris was one of 15 PhD students given the opportunity to present a poster during the conference. For 90-minutes Chris presented details of an analysis conducted on data, already collected from our ongoing study investigating how people perceive swear words (click here if you’d like to take part), specifically looking at whether there were a subset of swear words that were significantly more likely to be expressed (said out loud by someone) in response to pain.
Analysing data from 102 students studying in the School of Psychology at the University of Reading, results had shown that fuck and shit were significantly more likely than damn (and the other 80 swear words included) to be said in response to pain. Further analysis revealed that there was no relationship between how likely someone felt it was that they would say a swear word in response to pain and how offensive or taboo they considered the swear word to be. This suggests that the likelihood of someone picking a specific swear word to say in response to pain is not associated to the inherent ‘swear-wordiness’ of the word.
The finding that fuck and shit were significantly more likely to be said in response to pain than any other swear word was then fed into the context of the existing, empirical research that shows that saying a swear word out loud can help increase pain tolerance (e.g., Stephens et al., 2009). This is because there is a risk of over-stating the power of “swearing” to provide pain relief if it turns out that it is not swearing per se, but just a subset of swear words, that can actually help people deal with pain.