Morning everyone, how the hell are you today?
This week’s topic was profanity. We discussed the social
markers and appropriateness of swearing in everyday interactions. I found this
very interesting, but being from a psych background I became increasingly curious
as to the personal, psychological implications of swearing. So I did a little
research and found an article called The Psychology of Profanity (link attached
below).
The article describes profanity as an emotional outburst
typically of anger, frustration or pain in a helpless situation. Profanity
offers a mental outlet for this stress. Psychologically, the most significant
effect of using profanity “is that of a pleasant feeling of relief from a
painful stress” (Pg. 117). Apparently, “passionate outbursts are generally
succeeded by periods of good behaviour” (Pg. 118). It also notes that periods
of shouting or gesticulation that often accompany swearing may be beneficial to
your physiological health by relieving nerve tension.
These explanations seem quite logical except in the
situation of swearing for no apparent reason. Nowadays, it seems that people
use swear words as their own functioning part of a sentence. For example, the F
word can be a verb, noun, adjective, adverb etc. and not simply an exclamatory
remark on its own in a time of pain or anger.
Another thing I noticed right away about this paper was that
it only focused on the reasons why MEN swear. Is this implying that there is a
significant difference between the frequency and/or reasoning for swearing
between men and women? Or does this study use men as the control and simply
generalize the results to both genders like ignorant writers used to? What do
you think?
Reference:
Patrick, G 1901, 'The psychology of profanity', Psychological Review, 8, 2, 113-127, 02/10/2012,
http://ey9ff7jb6l.scholar.serialssolutions.com/?sid=google&auinit=GTW&aulast=Patrick&atitle=The+psychology+of+profanity.&id=doi:10.1037/h0074772&title=Psychological+review&volume=8&issue=2&date=1901&spage=113&issn=0033-295X
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