Rx for Pain: Swear, Loud and Often

"S - - T!!!" Admit it, letting loose with an expletive somehow makes you feel better after you accidentally slice your finger or stub your toe. Now that research has confirmed that cursing does indeed reduce the sensation of pain, perhaps we can sometimes give ourselves permission to yell bad words even louder, without worrying about what anyone will think. 

Swear When It Hurts

Richard Stephens, PhD, a lecturer in psychology and the director of the master’s degree program in psychological research methods at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, conducted a study exploring how cursing provides pain relief. It was published in the journal NeuroReport. His study involved a mixed-gender group of university students who were asked to repeat either a curse word or a neutral control word while their hands were submerged in icy water. Researchers found that swearing enabled participants to withstand the uncomfortably icy water for significantly longer. It brought about a measurable reduction in the perception of pain (calibrated with a pain perception questionnaire) and significantly increased heart rate (measured with an electronic heart-rate monitor). 

Dr. Stephens told me that participants were asked to repeat their assigned word over and over again at a consistent pace. "By using the same word over and over, we were attempting to keep conditions consistent," he said. "We looked specifically at pain tolerance and perception. When the study participants swore while experiencing the pain stimulus, they found the cold water less painful." 

Ladies First... 

Women, in particular, experienced a greater drop in pain perception when they were swearing. "We know that swearing evokes certain emotional responses, and that, in general, men tend to swear more than women," Dr. Stephens explained. "We speculated that in people who swear frequently, the emotional response erodes, making it a less effective mechanism in reducing the perception of pain or the ability to tolerate it."

Dr. Stephens also found that swearing was less effective in male participants who had been identified as being predisposed toward catastrophizing pain. For example, he said that if a person is prone to thinking that a small cut on his hand is likely to result in a nasty infection or some other catastrophic outcome, swearing will be less effective as a coping mechanism.

I may not feel particularly proud of myself the next time I bump my head and blurt out a naughty word -- but at least I know there’s science to justify my reaction.

Source(s):

Richard Stephens, PhD, is a lecturer in psychology and the director of the master’s degree program in psychological research methods at Keele University in Staffordshire, England.

The Anatomy of a Stimulus Package

It is a slow day in the small Saskatchewan town of Pumphandle and streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody is living on credit. 

A tourist visiting the area drives through town, stops at the motel, and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs to pick one for the night. As soon as he walks upstairs, the motel owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill to his supplier, the Co-op. The guy at the Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her "services" on credit. The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner. 

The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the traveler will not suspect anything. At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, picks up the $100 bill and leaves. No one produced anything. No one earned anything... However, the whole town is now out of debt and now looks to the future with a lot more optimism. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a "stimulus package" works.

Student jailed for 2 nights when she can't show ID

Student jailed for 2 nights when she can't show ID

By JIM DWYER
updated 11/2/2011 1:25:46 PM ET

NEW YORK — The arresting officer came by the cell, Samantha Zucker said, to make snide remarks about finding her with a friend in Riverside Park after its 1 a.m. closing.

For instance:

“He was telling me that I needed to get a new boyfriend, that I should get a guy who takes me out to dinner,” Ms. Zucker said. “He mocked me for being from Westchester.”

Early in the morning on Oct. 22, a Saturday, Ms. Zucker, 21, and her friend Alex Fischer, also 21, were stopped by the police in Riverside Park and given tickets for trespassing. Mr. Fischer was permitted to leave after he produced his driver’s license. But Ms. Zucker, on a visit to New York City with a group of Carnegie Mellon University seniors looking for jobs in design industries, had left her wallet in a hotel two blocks away.

She was handcuffed. For the next 36 hours, she was moved from a cell in the 26th Precinct station house on West 126th Street to central booking in Lower Manhattan and then — because one of the officers was ending his shift before Ms. Zucker could be photographed for her court appearance, and you didn’t think he was going to take the subway uptown while his partner stayed with her at booking, did you? — she was brought back to Harlem.

There she waited in a cell until a pair of fresh police officers were rustled up to bring her back downtown for booking, where she spent a second night in custody.

The judge proceeded to dismiss the ticket in less than a minute.

News about the Police Department lately could run under the headline of the daily Dismal Development, starting with a judge declaring Tuesday that an officer was guilty of planting drugs on entirely innocent people and continuing back a few days to gun-smuggling, pepper-spraying and ticket-fixing.

Here, in the pointless arrest of Ms. Zucker, is a crime that is not even on the books: the staggering waste of spirit, the squandering of public resources, the follies disguised as crime-fighting. About 40,000 people a year — the vast majority of them young black and Latino men — are fed like widgets onto a conveyor belt of arrest, booking and court, after being told to empty their pockets and thus commit the misdemeanor of “open display” of marijuana.

Such arrests are a drain on the human economy.

Ms. Zucker said that throughout her stay in police station cells, other officers were shocked that she had not been given a chance to have a friend fetch her ID. “The female officers were gossiping that the officer who arrested me had an incredibly short fuse,” she said.

We are instructed by the mayor that the garish crimes of police gun-running and fake arrests are the work of rogues, not the daily toil of honest police officers. A fair point — but no more than Ms. Zucker’s observations of spiritual corruption.

“While it may have been one out-of-control officer that began the process,” she said, “no other officer had the courage to stand up against what they knew was a poor decision.”

After two days of storming design firms around the city with about 80 classmates, Ms. Zucker stopped at the hotel near West 103rd Street where the group was staying so she could drop off the bag she had been schlepping. Then she got Mr. Fischer — a classmate, not a boyfriend, the leering remark of the police officer to the contrary — to walk with her a few blocks to the park, at about 3 a.m. They wanted to see the Hudson River, which runs past her hometown of Ardsley, N.Y.

“We’re there five minutes when a police car came up and told us we had to leave because the park was closed,” Mr. Fischer said. “We said, ‘O.K., we didn’t know,’ and turned around to leave. Almost immediately, a second police car pulls up.”

Its driver said they would get tickets for trespassing and demanded their IDs. Ms. Zucker suggested that someone could bring her papers from the hotel. “He said it was too late for that, I should have thought of it earlier,” she said.

Asked about the policy, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said officers can allow a friend or relative to retrieve ID. He did not say if a supervisor approved the arrest of Ms. Zucker, which was attributed in court papers to a Police Officer Durrell of the 26th Precinct.

Twice, she said, the officer told her not to call him by a specific foul term.

“I said, ‘Sir, I never used that word.’ ”
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No doubt he was hearing things: the unspoken truth about his unspeakable actions.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

This article, "Dismal Tale of Arrest for Tiniest of Crimes," first appeared in The New York Times.

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