[peter303]

Harvard psychology prof Steven Pinker has an interesting demo of this in one of his stump lectures on language an emotion. He recites fifty English swear words in raid succession. By the end of that minute the audience is cringing. Who could think a distinguished Harvard professor could go potty mouth like that? Pinkers point is that swearing is processed by an alternative language system deeply tied to emotion and can override normal language emotion.

P.S. Pinker has several video lectures on his website and one of them might have this demonstration.

[pm90]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BcdY_wSklo

[posterboy]

The link doesn't contain the fifty English swear words in rapid succession, but I found interesting at which words he seems to fumble himself, eg. death and nigger (there, I said it), but that might just be observation bias. Still, he seems to have missed to list death as a principle category.

[sir_kin]

Weirdly enough, when he was demonstrating the Stroop test, I had absolutely no slowdown for cuss words; maybe 3x faster than when the text named a different color.

[Tiksi]

Agreed, I could name the colors for the swears as fast as the initial one where the word was the same as the color it was printed in.

Also there's a trick to doing the Stroop test where the colors don't match. Look just above the word and slightly out of focus, that way you're just naming the color of the blob instead of fighting yourself to read it.

[uwu]

is there a full version available somewhere?

[posterboy]

$#!7, the description !@$%& says Full talk available at http://www.thesciencenetwork.org

haven't looked that up though.

[psyc]

Language strongly associated with violence, threats, and insults isn't part of the normal language system?