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Physiological Arousal and Cursing: Support for a Feedback Model of Neurogenic Cursing
Pattullo, Lucia
Pattullo, Lucia
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2023-12
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Communication Sciences
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http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/9523
Abstract
Many neurological disorders are characterized by uncontrolled or non-volitional cursing. The social stigma of coprophenomena can be immense, particularly for young adults with traumatic brain injury or Tourette Syndrome. Little is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying non-volitional cursing, and there is no known treatment. To this end, I propose a mechanism that will prove useful as a guiding theoretical framework for modeling different types of cursing. My overarching hypothesis is that uncontrolled cursing is the breakdown of a feedback loop between physiological arousal and controlled language output. I operationalize the hypothesis that cursing occurs in the context of physiological arousal and the act of cursing further modulates arousal. This thesis will illustrate how the model predicts different patterns of impairment across different disorders of emotion and behavior dysregulation. I will test predictions of the model in two experiments both involving manipulations of arousal and linguistic content. In Experiment 1, I compare the arousal of the lexical environment of curse words to the that of randomly selected non-curse words in a large natural language corpus. In Experiment 2, I use a verbal fluency paradigm to compare physiological arousal and subsequent language production during a cursing task vs. a non-cursing task.
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