Stubbed toes, paper cuts, a burn from a hot pan--all things commonly followed up with a few four-letter words. More intense events, like giving birth, usually elicit a lengthy torrent of language often attributed to longshoreman and truck drivers.

After hitting his finger with a hammer--and expressing a few expletives--Richard Stephens, PhD, a psychology teacher at Keele University in the United Kingdom, started to wonder if letting loose some nasty words had any bearing on one's tolerance of pain.

"A midwife said that swearing was very common on the delivery ward," says Dr. Stephens who witnessed Mrs. Stephens utter a few cuss words while in labor. "This really got me thinking about whether swearing affects pain directly and lead to this research."

He did a little poking around and found that no one had really established a link between swearing and the actual feeling of pain. So he and two colleagues, John Atkins and Andrew Kingston, decided to find out if using profanity would mitigate pain.

Their findings, published in July 2009 in NeuroReport, reports that yes, swearing does have a pain-lessening effect. Why is a little less clear. Perhaps because swearing actually taps in to the emotional brain center (right brain), instead of the left side where language production takes place. However it happens, it seems a few of F-bombs take the sting out of getting hurt.

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