Words are more frightening than knives

Westerners often say "A dangerous sentence is more painful than tens of thousands of knives" to teach children how to behave. Now psychologists have figured out why a sentence that cures poisons is more frightening than a few blows.

Psychologists from Purdue University, Indiana, USA, asked a group of volunteers to recall psychological shocks and physical pain five years ago. Volunteers recorded their experiences on paper and participated in a psychological examination.

The analytical results show that all volunteers remember mental injuries more clearly than physical pain.

Photo: Daily Mail.

In the next test, the team asked volunteers to perform thinking-ability exercises after recalling events that caused them to suffer physical and mental pain. Psychologists found that they scored higher scores after remembering physical pain.

Zhansheng Chen, an expert at Purdue University, thinks that mental shocks exist for a long time in human memory and cause psychological problems can be an undesirable effect in the evolution of cortex - where controls thinking, cognitive and language activities.

"The evolution of the cerebral cortex helps people improve their ability to react and adapt to every change in their surrounding environment. For example, physical pain teaches people that we should not repeat actions. However, the evolution of the cerebral cortex also offers an unexpected impact: it allows us to store psychological shocks for a very long time , " Chen explained.