#@%• !

Bumped your shin on the coffee table? Go ahead and swear. It just might lessen the pain, a new study suggests.

Repetitive use of a curse word of choice enabled students who participated in the experiment at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, to hold their hand in frigid water longer than they could when they repeated an ordinary word, according to the study in the journal NeuroReport.

Keele psychology professor Richard Stephens, lead author of the study, said the 67 students, after submerging their hands into room-temperature water (77 degrees Fahrenheit), were able to keep their hand immersed in 41-degree water an average of 155 seconds when they repeated a swear word. When they repeated a neutral word, they could keep their hand immersed an average of only 115 seconds.

Swearing also increased heart rate, which was measured after each submersion, and decreased perceived pain, which was measured in a psychological test, the study said.

"Swearing may have induced a fight or flight response and ... nullified the link between fear of pain and pain perception," the study concluded.

"Pain is twofold: It's a physiological response to a mechanical or thermal stimulus, but there's also an emotional component to pain," said Doris Cope, University of Pittsburgh pain researcher and clinician.

"We know that if there's an emotional reaction going on it may block some of the pain reaction, so it's like a distraction. If you pinch somebody, but they have a distraction, they don't know that they've been pinched," Dr. Cope said.

"It's all proportional: If you're terrified because a bear is chasing you, you're not going to notice you have a sore tooth."

Interestingly, men's and women's baseline scores were different.

Women, on average, could tolerate the cold water 60 seconds less than men, no matter what type of word they uttered, Dr. Stephens said. "In swearing, both groups increased [their submersion times], but women stayed 60 seconds less than men. In both groups swearing helped similarly but women had a lower baseline. ..."

Though both sexes experienced a reduction in perceived pain while swearing, females did so to a greater extent. Similarly, swearing increased the heart rate of both sexes, but more so for females, the study showed.

Dr. Cope thought that result may have stemmed from differences in the way swearing figures in men's and women's vocabularies.

Women in general may have a stronger emotional response to cursing because many do not swear as often as men, Dr. Cope said. "The words might have more shock value.

"I suggested for prisoners who commonly swear, the words kind of lose their shock value, whereas a nun who never uses those words may be more emotionally aroused by cursing."

Dr. Stephens said the study was prompted by two personal experiences.

"I hit myself with a hammer in the house and [swore]," he said. "The other one was when my wife was having our baby four or five years ago and there was a part of the delivery that got difficult, and she swore a little and then apologized. ... The midwife said, 'Don't apologize. We get that language here all the time.' Both of those made me think about swearing and pain.

Psychologists predicted just the opposite of what Dr. Stephens' study found. The consensus was that swearing would not be helpful, and in fact would decrease pain tolerance and increase pain perception when compared with not swearing.

The authors set up the experiment with that opinion as the hypothesis, but, Dr. Stephens said, they really expected the results they measured.

"Swearing is such a common response to pain it would be illogical if swearing had made pain worse," he said. "As soon as you're in pain, you want the pain to stop so you wouldn't do something that would make the pain worse."