News release

From: American Psychological Association

Swearing boosts performance by helping people feel focused, disinhibited, study finds

Letting out a swear word in a moment of frustration can feel good. Now, research suggests that it can be good for you, too: Swearing can boost people’s physical performance by helping them overcome their inhibitions and push themselves harder on tests of strength and endurance, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

“In many situations, people hold themselves back – consciously or unconsciously – from using their full strength,” said study author Richard Stephens, PhD, of Keele University in the U.K. “Swearing is an easily available way to help yourself feel focused, confident and less distracted, and ‘go for it’ a little more.”

The article was published in the journal American Psychologist.

Previous research by Stephens and others has found when people swear, they perform better on many physical challenges, including how long they can keep their hand in ice water and how long they can support their body weight during a chair push-up exercise.

“That is now a well replicated, reliable finding,” Stephens said. “But the question is -- how is swearing helping us? What's the psychological mechanism?”

He and his colleagues believed that it might be that swearing puts people in a disinhibited state of mind. “By swearing, we throw off social constraint and allow ourselves to push harder in different situations,” he said.

To test this, the researchers conducted two experiments with 192 total participants. In each, they asked participants to repeat either a swear word of their choice, or a neutral word, every two seconds while doing a chair pushup. After completing the chair pushup challenge, participants answered questions about their mental state during the task. The questions included measures of different mental states linked to disinhibition, including how much positive emotion participants felt, how funny they found the situation, how distracted they felt and how self-confident they felt. The questions also included a measure of psychological “flow,” a state in which people become immersed in an activity in a pleasant, focused way.

Overall, and confirming earlier research, the researchers found that participants who swore during the chair pushup task were able to support their body weight significantly longer than those who repeated a neutral word. Combining the results of the two experiments as well as a previous experiment conducted as part of an earlier study, they also found that this difference could be explained by increases in participants’ reports of psychological flow, distraction and self-confidence – all important aspects of a disinhibition.

“These findings help explain why swearing is so commonplace,” said Stephens. “Swearing is literally a calorie neutral, drug free, low cost, readily available tool at our disposal for when we need a boost in performance.”

In the future, the researchers plan to explore whether this boost from swearing works in any context where success depends on overcoming hesitancy, according to study co-author Nicholas Washmuth, DPT, of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “Our labs are now studying how swearing influences public speaking and romantic approach behaviors, two situations where people tend to hesitate or second-guess themselves," he said.