Never underestimate words because they hurt!
Can words hurt?
There has been a lot of debate about whether words actually have the power to hurt, or whether they remain a metaphorical expression. There are people who believe that if you use the 'right words at the right time', you can do quite a lot of harm with words. On the other hand, there are those who believe in the power of the physical to hurt.
Maria Richter, Judith Eck, Thomas Straube, Wolfgang H.R. Miltner and Thomas Weiss carried out a study in Germany in 2008-2009, hoping to find out whether words have the power to hurt. The subjects were 8 men and 8 women, all of whom were perfectly healthy, right-handed, native German speakers aged between 22 and 23. None of them had a history of chronic high-pain-related illnesses in their lifetime, and none of them used any medical preparations on a daily basis.
Researchers monitored changes in subjects' facial expressions and attitudes, as well as MRI brain impulse responses in different sectors, when they heard negative, positive and neutral pain-related words, when they imagined the situation, and also looked at possible differences in word focus.
The study showed that when pain-related words were heard both directly and as a distractor (subjects were focused on other activities and the words were spoken quietly in the background), and when a pain-related situation was imagined, areas in the pain matrix were activated.
As all subjects were free of chronic pain-causing diseases, the result may not be the same for people with these diseases.
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