why BDSM can be surprisingly useful in linguistics

i'm serious

Every so often when I do my linguistic research, I come across a truly unhinged academic rabbit hole that leaves me questioning everything about the field.

Recently, for example, I’ve been looking into the causes of pain vocalizations—why we say “ow” or “ouch” when we’re hurt. It’s actually quite fascinating: our responses are automatic, and yet they vary across cultures. You might say “ay” in Spanish, but “jao” in Croatian or “aya” in Korean, because there is a level of societal variance to it. All these sounds share some kind of /a/ or /o/ vowel, but we end up getting so used to our culture-specific versions that our brains encode them as part of our instinctive reactions to things.

This particular rabbit hole began with a 2015 paper published in the Journal of Pain,¹ which might be the best name for an academic journal that I’ve come across. In an experiment where 56 participants had to put their hands in painfully cold water, the researchers found that saying “ow” increased the duration that subjects could keep their hands immersed, suggesting that pain vocalizations help people cope with discomfort and can even lower magnitude of perceived pain. A similar study, in Pain Reports (another delightfully named journal),² found that increasing the pitch and loudness of pain vocalizations similarly helped participants deal with having their hands in hot water.

There are a few plausible explanations for this—pain responses may have emerged in evolutionarily advantageous contexts like attracting help or warding off predators—and the vocalizations also contract muscles which could help moderate pain. Unfortunately, the authors’ conclusions had to be fairly limited, since their controlled experiments critically lacked the natural extemporaneity of real pain responses. In the words of the first paper, “future research should [include] a spontaneous exclamation condition.”

Hold up. What does that mean?? How can you measure spontaneous pain? You can’t just follow someone around all day and hope they stub their toe on a rock, and you certainly can’t inflict pain without informed consent (unless you’re willing to face the wrath of your university ethics board). So how, then, can a well-meaning linguist follow the authors’ recommendation?

The best solution genuinely might be to film people consensually inflicting pain on each other, which is exactly what a bunch of Finnish researchers did in a study earlier this year.³ Through recordings of 10 couples interacting in intimate settings, the team was able to study how pain response cries are used in interpersonal tactile communication: one participant, for example, involuntarily produced louder, more strained moans when in an uncomfortable position, which helped indicate to her partner to ease up. Similar responses among other couples, through contexts like choking-related vocalizations, suggest an important communicative function inherent to our pain responses.

one of the audio transcriptions used in the Finnish study

While this is the first and only study of its kind, it clearly provides a crucial complement to the sterile lab results of the first two experiments. At the same time, it barely scratches the surface of everything we can learn from intimate recordings—and it seems like more and more linguists are expressing interest in using similar research methods. As the most conscientious way to scientifically study pain vocalizations, we’ll therefore most likely see the role of BDSM linguistics continue to grow in the near future.

1. Swee G, Schirmer A. On the Importance of Being Vocal: Saying "Ow" Improves Pain Tolerance. Journal of Pain. 2015 Apr;16(4):326-34. doi: 10.1016/j.jpain.2015.01.002. Epub 2015 Jan 24. PMID: 25622894.

2. Lautenbacher, Stefan; Salinas-Ranneberg, Melissa; Niebuhr, Oliver; Kunz, Miriam. Phonetic characteristics of vocalizations during pain. Pain Reports 2(3):p e597, May/June 2017. | DOI: 10.1097/PR9.0000000000000597.

3. Katila, J., Hofstetter, E., & Keevallik, L. (2023). Cries of Pleasure and Pain: Vocalizations Communicating How Touch Feels in Romantic Relationships. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 56(4), 330–349. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2023.2272529