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Showing posts from February, 2019
6th SwiSca symposium keynote address: Dr. Richard Stephens “Give me strength!” Benefits of swearing for pain, physical performance and beyond Abstract Swearing is a fascinating aspect of language. For instance, evidence from Tourette's sufferers and aphasics suggests swearing may not rely on the usual language areas in the left cortex. In addition, while people tend to think of the use of four letter words as a modern phenomenon, the reality is that the earliest recorded uses of these words date back 1,000 years (the F word is one of the most recent, at c1500). Dr Richard Stephens, a psychologist based at Keele University in the United Kingdom, will be talking about his research, published in well-respected peer-review journals, conducted over the last decade. Across a number of studies Dr Stephens’s work has shown that swearing can help people become more tolerant of pain, that swearing can boost performance of physical strength and power tasks as well as other f