秽语对生理疼痛和社会疼痛的缓解作用

The Relieving Effect of Swearing on Physical Pain and Social Pain

秽语是指粗俗、禁忌的语言,一般在侮辱他人、强调观点等时候出现。实验结果表明,作为疼痛的一种情绪反应,秽语能够缓解生理疼痛,在冷水中重复秽语的被试疼痛忍耐度更高、疼痛感知更低,心率的变化表明某种情绪反应被引发从而使疼痛得到减轻;基于疼痛重叠理论,研究发现秽语也能够缓解由社会排斥带来的社会疼痛及生理疼痛敏感,秽语频率能影响疼痛减退效应,秽语频率越高的被试生理疼痛忍耐度越低。秽语缓解疼痛的神经机制还有待进一步研究和探索。本文旨在对这一主题的文献进行梳理和总结。

Swearing often refers to vulgar and taboo language, which generally appears when insulting others and emphasizing opinions. Experimental results suggest that, swearing, as an emotional response to pain, can alleviate physical pain. Compared with not swearing, subjects who repeated swearing words in cold water had higher pain tolerance and lower perceived pain score. Changes in heart rate indicated that emotional response was triggered to reduce pain. Based on the theory of pain overlap, recent evidence shows that swearing can also alleviate the social pain caused by social exclusion. Moreover, the daily frequency of swearing affected the effect of hypoalgesia;the higher the daily frequency of swearing, the lower the physical pain tolerance when swearing. The neural mechanism of swearing to alleviate pain remains to be further studied and explored. This paper aims to review and summarize the literature on this topic.