Cursing: Is It Good Or Bad For You?

CHICAGO (CBS) -- Is cursing good or bad for you?

CBS 2 Los Angeles' Jennifer Kastner looked into the science of swearing and found some interesting discoveries.

Benjamin Bergen, the professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego said cursing could be linked to higher intelligence.

"It turns out that on average, the ones who swear the most also have the biggest vocabulary overall," Bergen said.

Bergen is the author of "What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves" and said it is amazing what you can find on how the brain works and how people are affected by profanity.

Bergen ran an experiment to dig deeper on a person's impact of foul language.

"There's this idea that swearing might be cathartic" and can relieve anger and aggression, Bergen said.

But what he found out was, cursing makes people no less aggressive.

Curious on who swears more: men or women?

"Men are much more frequent users of swears than women are," Bergen found. "But I don't know whether that actually holds in private. I'm told by some of my female friends that that's absolutely not true in private."

The most common curse word used? It seems to be the F word, Bergen said.

Bergen believes society's stigma over the four-letter word will continue to soften overtime.

"We start to discover that they are just words," Bergen said. "It's kind of like George Carlin put it: The words are innocent. It's the uses that you put them to that can be harmful or not."