Using Swear Words Increases the Irritability – a Study Using AI Algorithms

Abstract

This paper presents the effects’ analysis produced by the frequent use of swearing from the perspective of irritability. The analysis was carried out with the help of two psychological questionnaires that were completed by the volunteers before and after the inducement of the negative emotions and automatic recognition functions implemented by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), applied for the speech signals of two volunteer groups for whom negative emotions were induced. The CNN architecture uses Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), obtained from the speech signal, and has 87,944 trainable parameters, the outputs of the network being the 8 main classes of emotion detected by the algorithm (1 neutral, 3 positive, and 4 negative). The CNN also gives information about the negative emotion and irritability level. For the volunteers who swore during the experiment, there is an increase of 14% in negative emotion intensity and of 21% for the irritability level than for the volunteers who didn’t swear during the trials. The use of this current research is the understanding that cursing causes a higher level of irritability.