A New Study Suggest A Link Between Swearing Fluency And Emotion; See Details Here!

• comments
• 
• 

A recent study by Dr. Richard Stephens, a psychologist at Keele University reveals how experiencing emotion can influence on people swearing. Dr. Stephens has previously published a study which found that swearing helps people to cope with pain and hurtful situations. However, his recent study tends to focus more on how a person's emotions and state of mind can affect the voluble pace of swearing.

The study looked into the relationship between the fluency of swearing and emotion. In the study, the researchers asked the participants to play a first-person shooter video game with the intention of arousing a heightened emotive response. The study author used a golf video game for comparison purposes.

After playing the game, the study participants were then asked to name the different swear words they could think of in one minute. This procedure which is popularly known as the "Swearing Fluency Task," was developed by psychologists in the United States. The researchers found that the participants who engaged in the first person shooter game had an increased state of aggression and were found to swear more in the Swearing Fluency Task when compared to those who played the golf video game, according to Esciencenews.

However, the findings of the study indicate that there is a direct connection between emotional arousal and swearing. While the findings may seem too obvious, these researchers confirmed the association objectively. The result of the study was able to shed more light on opinions whether swearing could be considered as a socially acceptable way to express one's emotion.

"We appear to have established a two-way relation between swearing and emotion. Not only can swearing too much provoke an emotional response but raised emotional arousal has been shown to facilitate swearing, or at least one aspect of it, swearing fluency," Dr. Stephens explains. He added that the psychology studies suggest that there is more to swearing than routine offense-causing or a lack of linguistic hygiene. Language is a sophisticated toolkit and swearing is a useful component, according to Science Daily.

The continued to say that when he talks about the psychology of swearing, he often ends up with transcripts of the final utterances of fatal air crash pilots, captured on the black box flight recorder as many of these amazingly feature swearing. He noted that he usually stress that swearing must be important considering its prominence in matters of life and death. The study was funded by a British Psychological Society Undergraduate Research Assistantship and published in The Conversation.