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Swearing is a motor activity with a strong emotional content. The brain processes swear words and normal words differently. The brain stores swear words that are "emotionally charged" as whole units. The brain relies on the limbic system, which controls memory, emotion, and behavior, and the basal ganglia, which controls motor functions and impulse control, to process the "swear words".

Our social media activity can give extraordinary - and often unintentional - insights into our mental wellbeing. Little wonder that professionals whose job it is to look after our emotional health are now exploring how they can use these signals to take the 'emotional pulse' of individuals, communities, nations and even the entire species. Apparently, the words that're said are less important than the category or the frequency of posts in re: painting user profiles.

The amygdala is an almond shaped mass of nuclei located deep within the temporal lobe of the brain. It is a limbic system structure that is involved in many of our emotions and motivations, particularly those that are related to survival. The amygdala is involved in the processing of emotions such as fear, anger and pleasure. > Additional link provided to other neurological terms such as the hippocampus.

"A small band of linguists, engineers and computer scientists, among others, are busy training computers to recognize hallmarks of what they call emotional speech - talk that reflects deception, anger, friendliness and even flirtation. ... Algorithms developed by Dr. Hirschberg and colleagues have been able to spot a liar 70 percent of the time in test situations, while people confronted with the same evidence had only 57 percent accuracy ... His lab has also found ways to use vocal cues to spot inebriation, though it hasn't yet had luck in making its computers detect humor - a hard task for the machines, he said."

"Web addicts have brain changes similar to those hooked on drugs or alcohol, preliminary research suggests. ... Dr Hao Lei and colleagues write in Plos One: 'Overall, our findings indicate that IAD has abnormal white matter integrity in brain regions involving emotional generation and processing, executive attention, decision making and cognitive control.' ... Prof Gunter Schumann, chair in biological psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, said similar findings have been found in video game addicts. ... further studies with larger numbers of subjects were needed to confirm the findings." Link to the actual study: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030253

Joshua Greene, Harvard psychologist, posits that we have two competing moral circuits in our brains: a utilitarian, rational, cost-benefits circuit and an emotional circuit. Both circuits battle for dominance in the brain's ventromedial prefrontal cortex. When dilemmas produce vivid images in our heads, we tend to respond emotionally, due to our natural wiring. Take away the pictures - the brain goes into rational, calculation mode. In another experiment, Greene and a colleague, Amit, also found that people who think visually make more emotional moral judgments, whereas verbal people make more rational calculations.

This article explains that perhaps facial expressions are misleading. Instead, people should look at other people's body language to find out unsaid emotions.

An interesting story--my students, you might recall Sheryl Turkle of MIT referencing robot therapists in her TED talk. USC has developed a robot therapist, Ellie, designed to talk to people who are struggling emotionally, and to take their measure in a way no human can. Originally developed to work with military PTSD patients, Ellie's purpose: to gather information and provide real human therapists detailed analysis of patients' movements and vocal features, in order to give new insights into people struggling with emotional issues. The body, face and voice express things that words sometimes obscure. Ellie's makers believe that her ability to do this will ultimately revolutionize American mental health care.

Developing language skills appears to be more important for boys than girls in helping them to develop self-control and, ultimately, succeed in school, according to a study led by a Michigan State University researcher. Language skills -- specifically the building of vocabulary -- help children regulate their emotions and behavior and that boys lag behind girls in both language skills and self-regulation. The researchers noted that while girls overall seemed to have a more natural ability to control themselves and focus, boys with a strong vocabulary showed a dramatic increase in this ability to self-regulate -- even doing as well in this regard as girls with a strong vocabulary.

The human voice appears to trigger pleasure circuits in the brains of typical kids, but not children with autism, a Stanford University team reports. The finding could explain why many children with autism seem indifferent to spoken words. The Stanford team used functional MRI to compare the brains of 20 children who had autism spectrum disorders and 19 typical kids. In typical kids there was a strong connection between areas that respond to the human voice and areas that release the feel-good chemical dopamine, but that connection was reduced in autistic children. Connections between voice areas and areas involved in emotion-related learning also were weaker, creating greater communication difficulties. The new study's suggestion that motivation is the problem could explain why speech often comes late to children with autism even though the brain circuit involved in processing spoken words seems to function normally; the reward circuitry isn't working the way it does in typical children.

What our speech reveals about us

"Now, after a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs, Dr. DeWall and other psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesized, the words "I" and "me" appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there's been a corresponding decline in "we" and "us" and the expression of positive emotions."

"... a group of us have been studying ways to make sense of large amounts of language data generated by people on the ground in Libya. ... You won't be surprised when I tell you what event coincides with the most obvious peak in positive emotion as well as in volume of tweet traffic: Gaddafi's death. Specifically, the vertical dashed black line marks the time when news of Gadaffi's capture and death were first made public." Their report, Evolution of Sentiment in the Libyan Revolution, is here (PDF): https://webspace.utexas.edu/dib97/libya-report-10-30-11.pdf

Baby's communicate through emotions. Fun video of twin babies communicating with babbling (ie secret language of twins).

Study that show Twitter can cause a risk of heart disease through negative emotions and expressed through Twitter such as anger, stress, and fatigue. Scientists have been using twitter to demonstrate the connection between language and emotional states and their physical outcomes.

Words have more meaning than just their definition, and the use of words can give off emotions and more. People often use words to describe situations before thinking if what they're saying is considerate and politically correct. This article shows how the use of words can affect people's mental illnesses, and by saying the wrong thing can cause the person to feel ostracized and refuse to get theraputic help.

Excellent, though long essay on swearing: taboo language that has a special role in expressing and communicating emotion. (Be forewarned, sensitive readers: whole lotta profanity in this essay!)

Briefly explores the difference of "swear" words and their severity across the globe.

For curses to have impact, they need a dominating societal power and control structure attached to them. Strong language often involves naming things you desire but aren't supposed to desire; at the very least, it aims to upset power structures that may seem a bit too arbitrary. We tend to think of swear words as one entity, but they actually serve several distinct functions. Linguist Steven Pinker, in The Stuff of Thought, lists five different ways we can swear: descriptively, idiomatically, abusively, emphatically, and cathartically. Worldwide, words for genitalia are the most common focus of preferred strong language, the kind used by default for Pinker's five functions.

We often think of "bad" language as something universal to everyone around the world. But swearing is special to each and every language. Depending on the type of language, there are different ways to express anger. For example, in Bikol (a type of language in the phillipines) they have a whole different vocabulary to use when conveying the emotion of anger. In Luganda (an african language) they can convey anger by just changing the noun class prefix. As we can see different cultures convey their emotions differently and there is no "one way" to swear or show anger.

A quote from Liz Posner, the author of the article: "When I set out to research the German words that capture what it feels like to be an American living during the era of the Trump administration, I didn't expect there to be so damn many. Like many of my fellow citizens who have flocked to therapists' offices over the past year, eager to sort through their trauma at being governed by a narcissistic megalomaniac, I was already aware that the current political era was doing something strange to my psyche. But it can be hard to pin down exactly what these emotions are, if words for them, even exist." Fortunately, German, not English, is able to capture the nuances of these feelings