The relationship of swearing in respect to personality, religiosity, and social influences was analyzed in this study. Many assumptions are made about the effects of swear words and the act of swearing can have on an individual. The present study hypothesizes that the use of swears words is dependent on an individual's personality characteristics and that exposure first happens from an external source (mass media outlets) rather than a familiar source (family member). More specifically, extroverted personality types will be more likely to engage in the use of profanity, due to their more impulsive nature. Online surveys such as the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and The Urgency, Premeditation, Perseverance, & Sensation Impulsive Behavior Scale (UPPS-P) were used to collect data from 763 participants. The results indicated impulsivity was positively correlated with personality characteristics of neuroticism and swearing acceptance. Swearing acceptance was negatively correlated with how often participants' families took part in religious activities growing up and was positively correlated with how important religion is the participant, their family, and religious affiliation. In conclusion, familial exposure (i.e., mother) was dominant over any media source for exposure to swearing, which goes against the previous assumptions about swearing.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of counselor profanity on subjects' perceptions of counselor credibility and client satisfaction.

Although the effects of violent video games on aggression in users have been researched extensively and the resulting body of research shows that violent video games can increase aggressive behaviors, aggression-related feelings and thoughts, and physiological arousal, no empirical studies to date have examined whether there are similar and parallel effects of verbal aggression (e.g., profanity) in video game content. A 2 X 2 between-subjects factorial experiment (N = 321) tested the effects of profanity used by protagonists (protagonist profanity present versus absent) and antagonists (antagonist profanity present versus absent) on users' hostile expectations, accessibility of aggressive thoughts, aggressive feelings, perceived arousal, use of profanity, enjoyment, presence, and perceived performance while taking into account the potential moderating role of gender and controlling for several individual difference variables. The study's factors were manipulated via the creation of four versions of an original three-dimensional "first-person shooter" video game. Profanity used by both protagonist and antagonist characters was found to have significant effects on players' hostile expectations, an important higher-order aggressive outcome that is the most direct precursor to aggressive behaviors in the process described by the general aggression model. There was limited evidence for effects of profanity in game content on players' accessibility of aggressive thoughts, aggressive feelings, and perceived arousal. Additionally, profanity had little impact on how much players used profanity themselves, how much they enjoyed the game, feelings of presence, and how they rated their performance in the game. These trends were consistent across a range of demographic, personality, and video game experience dimensions that were measured, even though several of these individual difference variables were found to be related to some outcome variables and to each other. Therefore, while this study's findings did not necessarily indicate imitative modeling of profanity, they point to the possibility of more general effects regarding aggressive outcomes. This study's findings emphasize the need for future research investigating the effects of profanity in video games and other media. / Ph. D.

Are there any gender differences in how profanity is used in modern pop music in 2019? The purpose of this study was to analyse music lyrics with particular attention paid to frequency and profanity profiles between female and male artists. The corpus used in the investigation contains a total of 34 music lyrics equally divided between the genders and was collected from a Billboard chart called “Hot 100 Songs”. Although this sample was small and may not be representative of all modern pop music lyrics, trends in this data show that the female artists sampled from the Billboard chart actually use profanity more frequently than male artists, which is in contrast to previous research. Furthermore, the result shows that male and female artists have distinctive profiles regarding the types of profanity used. Female artists use the swear word bitch more frequently whereas male artists tent to use nigger with a greater frequency.

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The purpose of this study is to identify relationships between usage of taboo expressions in a selected YouTube clip, and how the audience of iDubbbzTV react to these taboo expressions and how they use them themselves. The data used in this study is in the form of spoken and written language which is transcribed and collected from a selected iDubbbzTV YouTube clip and its comment section. This qualitative study of the usage of taboo expressions in YouTube discourse shows that many cases of taboo expressions are used together with jokes and also sometimes serve as call-backs. Some taboo expressions are also used as intensifiers, which can feature in both negative and positive contexts. The study also finds that interpretations of taboo expressions can vary depending on co-text and contextual knowledge. / Syftet med denna studie är att identifiera samband mellan användandet av tabuuttryck i ett valt YouTubeklipp samt publikens egna respons och användande av dessa uttryck. Datan som används i denna studie är både muntligt och skriftligt språk. Denna data hämtas från videoklippet samt kommentarsfältet från den valda videon. Denna kvalitativa studie av tabuordsanvändande i YouTubediskurs visar att flera fall av tabuuttryck används i samband med skämt eller återkopplingar. Vissa tabuuttryck används i ett förstärkande syfte som både kan användas i negativ och positiv bemärkelse. Det har också visat sig att tolkningar av tabuuttryck kan variera beroende på förkunskap angående kontext och co-text.

Uppsatsens syfte är att undersöka hur pojkar och flickor på mellanstadiet upplever sitt bruk av kraftuttryck och slangord i och utanför klassrummet. Två undersökningsmetoder har valts för att på bästa sätt få fram ett tillförlitligt resultat; enkät samt strukturerade intervjuer. Enkäten besvarades av 76 elever i årskurs 5 och 6, och intervjuerna genomfördes med sju elever i årskurs 6. Resultatet visar på att elever anpassar sitt språkbruk beroende på situation och omgivning. Det visar också att elevernas attityd till kraftuttryck och slangord är negativ, men att de ändå använder det frekvent. Enkätresultatet tyder på att pojkarna använder mer kraftuttryck än flickorna, medan de intervjuade eleverna betonar individuella skillnader framför könsskillnaderna.

South Africa has a high incidence of crime where violence is particularly being committed against adolescents. Trauma has a disruptive influence on the development of adolescents. There is a lack of research focussing on pastoral counselling from a postmodern perspective regarding adolescents who experience acute trauma. This study makes use of three theories to make a meaningful contribution namely those of Rudolf Otto (1869 – 1937), René Girard (1923 - ) and Donald Capps (1990, 1993, 1994,1996). This study finds Otto`s theory about the numinous useful to assist traumatized adolescents on the road to healing. A numinous experience causes two results namely an overwhelming feeling of awe and a feeling of fear that comes from respect and distance. Traumatized adolescents should be guided into a meeting with God in a confusing post-modern world. Through the appropriation of the numinous adolescents can reach infinitely more than only being a “seeker”. Girard`s (1978) theory on mimetic violence and the scapegoat mechanism has been used in this study since it throws some light on the manner in which traumatized adolescents process trauma. The scapegoat mechanism theory helps one to understand how violence can be processed by scapegoating someone or something else. Girard`s theory also enlightens on the theme of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the key to overcome the horrors of the past. Adolescents particularly need role models. These role models can be found amongst other things, on television. Role models teach adolescents about revenge and reprisal. This study demonstrates that by applying Girard`s theory to the cross of Jesus, the traumatized and crucified Jesus becomes the role model for the “seekers” rather than identification with the peer group. Girard creates a greater understanding to manage trauma by exposing the scapegoat mechanism. Capps’ theory about hope and reframing on the other hand is useful in the sense that it gives hope for the future to adolescents. Hope therapy entails reframing since the situation needs a new perspective. The work of Capps, Reframing: New method in pastoral care (1990) was used as a framework. Narrative therapy is used because it assists the traumatized in their search for meaning. Ganzevoort’s (2000) theory regarding personal narrative identity proved to be useful in pastoral care to traumatized adolescents. The same applies to Erikson’s (1963) development theory, which includes the concept that the virtue of hope develops during childhood. It can also be associated with Moltmann’s (1974) view of hope as an alternative future for suffering persons. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Practical Theology / unrestricted

The researcher sought to understand the differences in framing used by alternative media outlets and traditional or mainstream media outlets. A sampling of articles about the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was used from alternative and traditional media publications to conduct this study. These articles were analyzed by a software program to determine themes and concepts within both data sets. The analysis revealed traditional media was less varied in themes than was alternative media, with the latter clearly showing an effort to be. Traditional media was found to provide routine coverage of commemorative services and very little critical analysis. Further highlighting the differences in the 2 media paradigms was the use of profanity in alternative media, which was discovered by using the "find" function available with word processing software.

With the rise of social media, cyberbullying and online spread of hate have become serious problems with devastating consequences. Mentimeter is an interactive presentation tool enabling the presentation audience to participate by typing their own answers to questions asked by the presenter. As the Mentimeter product is commonly used in schools, there is a need to have a strong toxicity detection program that filters out offensive and profane language. This thesis focuses on the topics of text pre-processing and robustness to datashift within the problem domain of toxicity detection for English text. Initially, it is investigated whether lemmatization, spelling correction, and removal of stop words are suitable strategies for pre-processing within toxicity detection. The pre-trained DistilBERT model was fine-tuned using an English twitter dataset that had been pre-processed using a number of different techniques. The results indicate that none of the above-mentioned strategies have a positive impact on the model performance. Lastly, modern methods are applied to train a toxicity detection model adjusted to anonymous Mentimeter user text data. For this purpose, a balanced Mentimeter dataset with 3654 datapoints was created and annotated by the thesis author. The best-performing model of the pre-processing experiment was iteratively fine-tuned and evaluated with an increasing amount of Mentimeter data. Based on the results, it is concluded that state-of-the-art performance can be achieved even when using relatively few datapoints for fine-tuning. Namely, when using around 500 − 2500 training datapoints, F1-scores between 0.90 and 0.94 were obtained on a Mentimeter test set. These results show that it is possible to create a customized toxicity detection program, with high performance, using just a small dataset. / I och med sociala mediers stora framtåg har allvarliga problem såsom nätmobbning och spridning av hat online blivit allt mer vanliga. Mentimeter är ett interaktivt presentationsverktyg som gör det möjligt för presentations-publiken att svara på frågor genom att formulera egna fritextsvar. Eftersom Mentimeter ofta används i skolor så finns det ett behov av ett välfungerande program som identifierar och filtrerar ut kränkande text och svordomar. Den här uppsatsen fokuserar på ämnena textbehandling och robusthet gentemot dataskifte i en kontext av identifiering av kränkande språk för engelsk text. Först undersöks det huruvida lemmatisering, stavningskorrigering, samt avlägsnande av stoppord är lämpliga textbehandlingstekniker i kontexten av identifiering av kränkande språk. Den förtränade DistilBERT-modellen används genom att finjustera dess parameterar med ett engelskt Twitter-dataset som har textbehandlats med ett antal olika tekniker. Resultaten indikerar att ingen av de nämnda strategierna har en positiv inverkan på modellens prestanda. Därefter användes moderna metoder för att träna en modell som kan identifiera kränkande text anpassad efter anonym data från Mentimeter. Ett balancerat Mentimeter-dataset med 3654 datapunkter skapades och annoterades av uppsatsförfattaren. Därefter finjusterades och evaluerades den bäst presterande modellen från textbehandlingsexperimentet iterativt med en ökande mängd Mentimeter-data. Baserat på resultaten drogs slutsatsen att toppmodern prestanda kan åstadkommas genom att använda relativt få datapunkter för träning. Nämligen, när ungefär 500 − 2500 träningsdatapunkter används, så uppnåddes F1-värden mellan 0.90 och 0.94 på ett test-set av Mentimeter-datasetet. Resultaten visar att det är möjligt att skapa en högpresterande modell som identifierar kränkande text, genom att använda ett litet dataset.