Effect of swearing on strength and power performance

Highlights

• Shows that swearing can increase performance of a task of physical power.

• Shows that swearing can increase performance of a task of physical strength.

• Does not find any evidence that autonomic arousal may underlie these effects.

Abstract

Objectives

Swearing aloud increases pain tolerance. The hypothesis that this response may be owed to an increase in sympathetic drive raises the intriguing question as to whether swearing results in an improvement in strength and power.

Design

Employing repeated measures designs, we evaluated the effect of repeating a swear word v. a neutral word on strength and power during anaerobic and isometric exercise through two experiments.

Method

Experiment #1 (n = 29) employed the Wingate Anaerobic Power Test (WAnT). Experiment #2 (n = 52) employed an isometric handgrip test.

Results

Greater maximum performance was observed in the swearing conditions compared with the non-swearing conditions for WAnT power (Experiment #1; dz = 0.618, p = 0.002) and hand grip strength (Experiment #2; dz = 0.962, p < 0.001). However, swearing did not affect cardiovascular or autonomic function assessed via heart rate, heart rate variability, blood pressure and skin conductance.

Conclusions

Data demonstrate increased strength and power performance for swearing v. not swearing but the absence of cardiovascular or autonomic nervous system effects makes it unclear whether these results are due to an alteration of sympathovagal balance or an unknown mechanism.

Introduction

Offensive or obscene language, known as cursing in the US and swearing in the UK (Soanes, 2002), is a near-universal feature of human language (Van Lancker & Cummings, 1999). To swear may be defined as to utter a word or phrase that is considered taboo, or in other words, forbidden (Pinker, 2007). This may be due to offense against a minority (e.g. derogatory terms referencing race, gender or disability) or citing vulgarities that most people would find obscene (e.g. references to incestuous intercourse). It is the swear words or phrases themselves that are taboo rather than the semantic meanings they convey. So, for example, talking about sexual intercourse need not of itself be obscene, however the word “fuck” is a well-recognized swear word deemed “very severe” by 71% of 1033 respondents in a national UK survey (Millwood-Hargrave, 2000). Nevertheless, there is not universal agreement as to which words are swear words and the same survey found that 9% of male responders and 4% of female responders deemed “fuck” to be a mild swear word or not a swear word at all.

While it may be difficult to define exactly what differentiates swearing from words that are just unpleasant still most people understand what swearing is; asked to nominate the swear words they most often use, a sample of Dutch students provided strikingly similar examples, such that “shit” and “cunt” were respectively nominated by 80% and 75% of respondents (Rassin & Muris, 2005). This shared cultural understanding of swearing has enabled researchers to begin to make progress in understanding why people swear and what functions swearing may have. For example (Allan & Burridge, 2009), suggest four functions of swearing based on their analysis of written and spoken Antipodean corpi. These are social swearing (as a marker for in-group solidarity), abusive swearing (which is self-explanatory), stylistic swearing (the use of bad language to make what is being said sound more enticing) and swearing as an emotive response (to frustration or the unexpected).

One common source of frustration is acute pain arising from accidental injury and prior research has found that, for most people, swearing in response to pain produces a pain lessening, or hypoalgesic effect. Participants repeating a swear word have been shown to withstand an ice-water challenge for some 40 s longer, on average, compared with a non-swear word (Stephens and Umland, 2011, Stephens et al., 2009). The concept that swearing represents an extreme form of emotional language (Jay & Janschewitz, 2012) together with elevations in heart rate and increased skin conductance reported as a consequence of swearing (Bowers & Pleydell-Pearce, 2011) suggests a causal path in which swearing leads to an emotional response, in turn activating the sympathetic nervous system, so facilitating a stress-induced analgesia which is mediated by this sympathetic nervous system activation. Such activation would be likely to result in the release of several neurotransmitters including the catecholamines epinephrine and nor-epinephrine. It is interesting to observe that these catecholamines act to raise heart rate and blood pressure providing greater oxygenation to working muscles (Reid & Rubin, 1989) such that muscle force production is improved with increased levels of catecholamine release (French et al., 2007). Given the links between swearing, sympathetic activation and the subsequent release of epinephrine and nor-epinephrine, the intriguing question arises as to whether swearing can affect physical performance via similar changes in organismic milieu.

This paper examines two scenarios where this might be expected. In Experiment #1 a well-known high-intensity 30s anaerobic cycling power challenge known as the Wingate Anaerobic Power Test (WAnT) was applied (Bar-Or, 1987) while in Experiment #2 an isometric hand-grip strength task was performed. The experiments examined how swearing affected strength, power, and cardiovascular and autonomic function in men and women. In both experiments it was hypothesised (i) that muscular performance would be improved by swearing; and (ii) that there would be increased sympathetic activation due to swearing. We discounted employing sex as a variable because, although women's and men's physical performance capabilities differ, we did not expect any specific effect of swearing. Previous research on pain tolerance (cold pressor latency) using a similar related design comparing swearing and non-swearing conditions has noted effect sizes of dz = 0.57 (Stephens & Umland, 2011) and dz = 1.2 (Stephens et al., 2009). In our a priori power calculation for Experiment #1 we set effect size at dz = 0.6 and two-tailed alpha at 0.05, finding that a sample size of N = 32 would provide 90% power in comparisons across the swearing and non-swearing conditions.