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Swearing has been around for a long time and remains an important part of language. Swearing proves to actually to be cathartic and helps us emphasize our emotions.

This article talks about: -swearing -what makes a word taboo -social norms -why "taboo" words still exist -to envoke feeling -part of the brain used while swearing -amygdala: processes emotion and memory -swearing and medical conditions -swearing and freedom of speech

This article explains different aspects of swearing. It talks about the idea of swearing itself and why swear words are considered swear words. It also explains why people swear and for what uses. It also explains how swearing affects the brain.

This article outline the bridge between the psychological and linguistic effects of swearing. I really appreciated this article because it plays both sides of the field, meaning that it addresses both the good and bad. It identifies the psychological goods to the person swearing, but also talks about the negative social connotation swearing can cause. They call it the "public-versus-science disconnect", meaning that there's a difference between the inner versus social benefits and detriments.

"Sarcasm so saturates 21st-century America that according to one study of a database of telephone conversations, 23 percent of the time that the phrase "yeah, right" was used, it was uttered sarcastically. ... The mental gymnastics needed to perceive sarcasm includes developing a "theory of mind" to see beyond the literal meaning of the words and understand that the speaker may be thinking of something entirely different ... Kids pick up the ability to detect sarcasm at a young age. ... There appear to be regional variations in sarcasm. ... Many parts of the brain are involved in processing sarcasm, according to recent brain imaging studies."

Sarcasm is an important aspect of society that seems to develop a person's brain as well. "Exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving" and it "exercises the brain more than sincere statements do." So the extra work it takes to understand sarcasm actually does work out our brains. Apparently sarcasm has been a way to show you belong and almost have a superior quality to those around you. Very interesting!

In modern society, there is sarcasm all around us. This article describes sarcasm and how we are so surrounded by it, that it is practically the "primary language". It also discusses how we detect sarcasm and how it is naturally picked up from a young age. Lastly, researchers found that some people have a difficult time detecting sarcasm so some computer scientists have actually developed a sarcasm detection device.

Lera Boroditsky, cognitive science professor at UC San Diego notes, "...a growing body of research is documenting how experience with language radically restructures the brain. People who were deprived of access to language as children (e.g., deaf individuals without access to speakers of sign languages) show patterns of neural connectivity that are radically different from those with early language exposure and are cognitively different from peers who had early language access. The later in life that first exposure to language occurs, the more pronounced and cemented the consequences. Further, speakers of different languages develop different cognitive skills and predispositions, as shaped by the structures and patterns of their languages. Experience with languages in different modalities (e.g., spoken versus signed) also develops predictable differences in cognitive abilities outside the boundaries of language. For example, speakers of sign languages develop different visuospatial attention skills than those who only use spoken language. Exposure to written language also restructures the brain, even when acquired late in life. Even seemingly surface properties, such as writing direction (left-to-right or right-to-left), have profound consequences for how people attend to, imagine, and organize information. The normal human brain that is the subject of study in neuroscience is a "languaged" brain. It has come to be the way it is through a personal history of language use within an individual's lifetime. It also actively and dynamically uses linguistic resources (the categories, constructions, and distinctions available in language) as it processes incoming information from across the senses.

Based at the University of California, Berkeley, the Greater Good Science Center sponsors groundbreaking scientific research into social and emotional well-being and helps people apply this research to their personal and professional lives. Their website has useful resources for Safe Conversations, Word Acts, and fostering better social relationships.

Recent studies suggest that metaphors are more than just fancy literary devices and that there is a psychological basis for linking cold with feelings of social isolation. Psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management wanted to test the idea that social isolation might generate a physical feeling of coldness. In their first experiment, they divided a group of volunteers into two groups. One group recalled a personal experience in which they had been socially excluded-rejection from a club, for example. This was meant to tap into their feelings of isolation and loneliness. The other group recalled an experience in which they had been accepted into a group. Afterwards, volunteers were asked to estimate the temperature in the room. Those who recalled memories of being ostracized experienced the ambient temperature of the room as colder. In a second experiment, researchers triggered feelings of exclusion by having volunteers play a computer-simulated ball tossing game. The game was designed so that some of the volunteers had the ball tossed to them many times, but others were left out. Afterwards, all the volunteers rated the desirability of certain foods and beverages: hot coffee, crackers, an ice-cold Coke, an apple, and hot soup. The findings were striking. As reported in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the "unpopular" volunteers who had been ostracized during the computer game were much more likely than the others to want either hot soup or hot coffee. Their preference for warm food and drinks presumably resulted from physically feeling cold as a result of being excluded. "It's striking that people preferred hot coffee and soup more when socially excluded," Leonardelli said. "Our research suggests that warm chicken soup may be a literal coping mechanism for social isolation."

Two graduate economics students from Washington State University used Twitter to analyze how sports pundits' reputation was affected by their confidence and accuracy at predicting the outcomes to sporting events. They analysed tweets in which professional pundits and fans made predictions about the winners of a series of high-profile baseball and American Football matches. Each tweet was given a "confidence" rating depending on its language, with words like "destroy" and "annihilate" scoring higher than "beat", for example. Both the pundits and fans' predictions were worse than chance, with the professional analysts only proving correct 47 per cent of the time and amateurs 45 per cent of the time. Yet pundits' confidence was measured as 50 per cent higher than amateurs, and they gained more followers on the networking website as a result, the researchers said. Presenting their findings at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Economics and Finance earlier this year, the researchers explained that being confident could increase a pundit's following by 17 per cent, while predicting every game correctly only raised it by 3.4 per cent.There was a similar pattern among amateurs, with brash people increasing their following by 20 per cent but correct guesses only raising it by 7.3 per cent. In general, pundits are better served by being brash and making people excited, they claimed.

A new studysuggests that children who speak multiple languages are better at understanding other people. And not only those who are fluent, but those who are simply exposed to another language in their daily lives.

Here's the link to the original University of Chicago study referenced by the Atlantic article, published in The Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21652258-children-exposed-several-languages-are-better-seeing-through-others-eyes-do

This article is pretty self-explanatory based on the article - it talks about how monkeys' vocal cords and bodies are physiologically able to talk and make distinct sounds. However, monkeys lack the brain circuits used by humans to learn sounds, and the special nerve sets humans use to control the shape of our vocal tracts.

A study showing that most users only read headlines without actually reading the article was shown to be accurate. A satirical science news site hosted an article with the headlines "Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting". Though the story was shared over 50 thousand times, about only 40% of the time the link was clicked. This is interesting because this shows that we tend to rather comment on what we believe about a article from its headline, instead of its content.

By Leonardo VintiñiEpoch Times Staff Perhaps the most important job for a copy editor is to ensure that text is free of spelling mistakes. But is error-riddled text any less understandable? On repeated occasions researchers have found that people can still understand the meaning of sentences even if they are completely made up of jumbled words.

An in-depth look into the science of MultiTasking, along with the real-world consequences it can have in business, school, and our daily lives.

"Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words. ... In a 2011 study, participants with electrodes in direct brain contact were able to move a cursor on a screen by simply thinking of vowel sounds. ... With the help of that model, when patients were presented with words to think about, the team was able to guess which word the participants had chosen. They were even able to reconstruct some of the words, turning the brain waves they saw back into sound on the basis of what the computer model suggested those waves meant. ... The authors caution that the thought-translation idea is still to be vastly improved before such prosthetics become a reality." Full study: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001251

We start building our sense of people's personalities from the first words they utter. Phil McAleer, of the University of Glasgow, ran an experiment where he recorded 64 people, men and women, from Glasgow, reading a paragraph that included the word "hello." He then extracted all the hellos and got 320 participants to listen to the different voices and rate them on 10 different personality traits, such as trustworthiness, aggressiveness, confidence, dominance and warmth. Interestingly, participants largely agreed on which voice matched which personality trait. One male voice was overwhelmingly voted the least trustworthy. The pitch of the untrustworthy voice was much lower than the male deemed most trustworthy. McAleer says this is probably because a higher pitched male voice is closer to the natural pitch of a female, making the men sound less aggressive and friendlier than the lower male voices. What makes females sound more trustworthy is whether their voices rise or fall at the end of the word, says McAleer. "Probably the trustworthy female, when she drops her voice at the end, is showing a degree of certainty and so can be trusted." (Perhaps a reason to avoid uptalk, if you're female?)

This study shows the science behind first impressions, and how certain voices can affect first impressions.

This article examines Nadine Gaab's 2014 study which established a connection - in both children and adults - between learning to play an instrument and improved executive functioning, like problem-solving, switching between tasks and focus. The article also cites the research of neuropsychologist Ani Patel, who advances the OPERA theory of music's benefits for learning. Patel notes "music is not an island in the brain cut off from other things, that there's overlap, that's the 'O' of OPERA, between the networks that process music and the networks that are involved in other day-to-day cognitive functions such as language, memory, attention and so forth," he says. "The 'P' in OPERA is precision. Think about how sensitive we are to the tuning of an instrument, whether the pitch is in key or not, and it can be painful if it's just slightly out of tune." That level of precision in processing music, Patel says, is much higher than the level of precision used in processing speech. This means, he says, that developing our brains' musical networks may very well enhance our ability to process speech. "And the last three components of OPERA, the 'E-R-A,' are emotion, repetition and attention," he says. "These are factors that are known to promote what's called brain plasticity, the changing of the brain's structure as a function of experience."

Why do women like deep voices and men prefer high ones?