Swearing/cursing and coprophenomena are prevalent in daily life; swearing makes up around 0.5% of the daily spoken content, however, the inter-individual variability is very high

Swearing and coprophenomena – a multidimensional approach. Asne Senberg et al. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, March 20 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.03.016

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1373509898823217155

Highlights

• Swearing/cursing and coprophenomena are prevalent in daily life.

• We provide a multidimensional approach to systematize swearing and coprophenomena.

• We provide a theoretical framework reasons, targets, functions/effects and influencing factors for swearing and coprolalia.

Abstract: Swearing, cursing, expletives – all these terms are used to describe the utterance of taboo words. Studies show that swearing makes up around 0.5% of the daily spoken content, however, the inter-individual variability is very high. One kind of pathologic swearing is coprolalia in Tourette syndrome (TS), which describes the involuntary outburst of taboo words. Coprolalia occurs in approximately 20-30% of all patients with TS. This review compares swearing in healthy people and coprolalia in people with TS and is the first one to develop a multidimensional framework to account for both phenomena from a similar perspective. Different research findings are embedded in one theoretical framework consisting of reasons, targets, functions/effects and influencing factors for swearing and coprolalia. Furthermore, the very limited research investigating obscene gestures and copropraxia, compulsive obscene gestures, is summarized. New research questions and gaps are brought up for swearing, obscene gestures and coprophenomena.

Keywords: swearingcursingcoprolaliacoprophenomenaTourette Syndrome