We fucking knew it.
Using bad language makes you physically stronger by temporarily lifting your inhibitions, new research has found.
To which the Back Page can only respond, fuck yeah!
Researchers from Keele University in (where else but) the UK, set out to confirm the previously observed beneficial effects of swearing on physical strength and assess whether state disinhibition (as opposed to trait disinhibition) mediates any such effects.
In their paper, published in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, they cite three potential mechanisms whereby swearing might increase state disinhibition. One comes from previous research that proposes the existence of a Behavioural Inhibition System (BIS) and a Behavioural Activation System (BAS), the latter being able to silence the former in the presence of what the researchers wonderfully call “hot cognitions” such as sexual arousal and swearing.
Another potential mechanism is one of distraction. Just as intoxication “acts to limit bandwidth by depleting cognitive resources”, swearing might distract our brains from performing inhibitory processes.
The third is called, unimprovably, “the fuck-it effect”. Here social desirability considerations that contribute to inhibition are obliterated by the very act of swearing.
The team took two measures of subjects’ strength under conditions of uttering a swear word and a neutral word of their choosing. They found an 8% improvement in grip strength and a 10% improvement in time spent holding a chair push-up in the swearing condition.
They also tested them on risky behaviour, a component of disinhibition, via a screen-based test of how far you’re prepared to pump up a virtual balloon (which, OK, must be what the bad kids are into these days), and found “significantly more pumps were made after the swearing vocalisation compared with the neutral vocalisation”. However, a mediation analysis did not suggest that the risky behaviour mediated the strength results.
While subjects rated repeated swearing as distracting, and their self-confidence improved while swearing, these also weren’t found to be significant mediators.
This left the “hot cognitions pathway” as the strongest contender as a mediator for the effect. “By this mechanism, hot cognitions generated through swearing may activate the BAS leading to BAS-related silencing of the BIS and consequent disinhibition.”
Henceforth when your Back Page correspondent is facing some adversity at work, instead of muttering “Give me strength” she will swear with glorious abandon, trusting the result to be the same.
If you see something that &^%$es your #$(*&3 ?%^$3, bleep it to felicity@medicalrepublic.com.au
