Word: psychologist
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...Swearing increases your pain tolerance," says Richard Stephens, a psychologist and lead author of the study, which was published this week in the journal NeuroReport. Although the experiment's initial hypothesis was inspired by anecdotal evidence from some pain researchers that swearing was actually a maladaptive behavior that served only to make things worse, Stephens' findings showed exactly the opposite. "The No. 1 priority is to make the pain go away. If [swearing] made the pain worse, that would be illogical," Stephens says, adding that you hardly need a scientific study to bear out the theory...
...everyday incident in his backyard that first piqued Stephens' fascination with cursing. While building a shed in his garden, he accidentally hammered his little finger. "I whacked my hand really, really hard," he says, "and while it was throbbing, I swore a bit." Being a psychologist, of course that got him thinking, Why did I react in that way? Later, he witnessed his wife do the same thing while giving birth to their daughter - at moments of intense pain, she would holler expletives. "She immediately apologized," he remembers, "but [the medical staff] said, 'Don't apologize! We get this...
That's probably because humans are hardwired to swear cathartically, says Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and author of The Stuff of Thought, an exploration of the psychology of language. Pinker distinguishes cathartic cursing from using profanity descriptively, idiomatically, abusively or for emphasis, and points to similar behavior in animals that suggests its evolutionary roots. If you step on a dog or cat's tail, it will let out a sharp yelp of pain, for example. "Swearing probably comes from a very primitive reflex that evolved in animals," Pinker says. "In humans, our vocal tract has been hijacked...
...homophobia, with its numerous risqué sex scenes, is too much for Ukrainian citizens to handle and has nixed the film's distribution. Maksym Rostotskiy, a member of the Ministry of Culture's Expert Commission on Film Distribution, says he felt obliged to ban the film "as a psychologist and a lawyer," adding that it contains "scenes of homosexual relations with elements of sexual perversions." (See pictures of Baron Cohen's outrageous Brüno promotions...
...study, presented last year at the Cognitive Neuroscientist Society's annual meeting, psychologist and neuroscientist Helena Westerberg of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm compared the cognitive abilities of 45 young adults (average age 25) with those of 55 older adults (average age 65). She found that after five weeks of computerized training on tasks ranging from reproducing a series of light flashes to repeating digits in the opposite order that they were given, the older group was able to reach the same level of working memory, attention and reaction time that the younger group had at the outset. (Notably...