Correlation Between Cursing and Stress Reduction
An amalgamation of scientists, therapists, psychologists, anthropologists and prominent educators have completed research that proves that living below the poverty line and profanity are correlated—and that cursing assists in dealing with stress associated with living below the poverty line. Those studies concluded that “cursing during a physically painful or stressful event can help those tolerate the agony accompanied with living below the poverty line.”
The amalgamation of experts now feel that the years spent berating adolescents—especially low-income adolescents—from cursing has been a miscalculation. Dr. Sarah Anathroby, an anthropologist at The University of Pennsylvania, asserted that “using curse words can also help adolescents who live below the poverty line build emotional resilience and cope with situations in which they feel that they have no control.”
With the permission from parents and guardians, adolescents from ages eleven to eighteen volunteered as test subjects to learn how tweens and teens are affected by using curse words. It should be noted that the tweens and teens did not know that they were being studied for the quality or quantitative data of cursing. Before the experiment, a neck monitor was attached to the necks of subjects which recorded all conversations, video and vitals. This allowed researchers to have a baseline, recording the data of curse words used before the experiment.
For thirty days, test subjects from wealthy homes,
$2,000,000 or more annually, lived in a below the poverty line
neighborhood—without the amenities they were accustomed to having. The subjects did have a person act as a parent by not being consistently available; the researchers found that some parents in the below the poverty line neighborhoods were not available for the following reasons: working two or more jobs and drug addiction were the explained reasons. Other subjects did not have a person act as a parent for unfortunately, it’s common for teens living in the below the poverty line neighborhood to have parents who have died or who are living in prison.
According to data collected before the experiment, Swanson, a sixteen year old African American male, averaged 1.5 curse words per day before his stay in the below the poverty line neighborhood by using the word “damn,” which usually preceded “she got a nice ass.”
The number greatly increased as Swanson went without the internet—a common occurrence for teens living in a below the poverty line neighborhood. “Fucking bullshit” was used increasingly by day four. The amalgamation of experts report that Swanson’s frustrations with having spotty access to the internet and using what he called a “ fucking mediocre chromebook” may have something to do with the rise in profanity; however Swanson’s blood pressure, which the neck monitor recorded, heightened during periods of frustration; his blood pressure subsided substantially while and after using profanity.
One instance in which the internet crashed, Swanson shrieked ”Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. This shit fucking sucks.
Fuck.” Swanson’s blood pressure registered at 140/90 before cursing; but upon immediately cursing his blood pressure decreased to 120/80.
Hadley, a seventeen-year old Caucasian female subject living across the street from Swanson, revealed similar data when interacting with the assigned car, a twenty year old Toyota Corolla. “Bullshit. The driver’s side door doesn’t open. What the fuck?” Hadley’s blood pressure and stress levels subsided considerably as well as her heart rate.
The research team is now recommending that educators teach curse words during vocabulary lessons to eleven to eighteen year old students from varied socioeconomic backgrounds in order to ensure that all students can access an array of curse words in order to deal with stress.
Further data has shown that adolescents living in below the poverty line conditions use four to five curse words at a rate of 125.5 times daily.
The committee recommends that educators and parents and guardians work with adolescents living below the poverty line to raise that number significantly so as to grapple with the stress unique to adolescents living below the poverty line; she also advocates for raising the number of curse words they have knowledge of to ten to twelve.
Dr. Sarah Anathroby added, “The kerfuffle is that we’re advocating for teens to curse, but the catharsis of cursing and our adolescents ability to deal with stress should be priority,”