That toothache could become more painful if you call it "painful."

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Words can hurt, and we're not just talking about your feelings, either. According to new German research published in the journal Pain, just hearing and speaking words associated with pain, such as "grueling" or "excruciating," can activate the part of your brain that processes pain. And future research looking at verbal stimuli and pain could find that language helps reduce chronic pain, too.

THE DETAILS: In the study, eight young men and young women, average age of 23, were hooked up to functional magnetic resonance tomography machines to find out how they processed words associated with experiencing pain. Researchers chose pain-related words from The McGill Pain Questionnaire, including excruciating, paralyzing, and grueling, among others. To account for reactions based simply on the word's negative connotation, the study participants were also confronted with negative (but not pain-related) words like disgusting, smelly, and dirty. "Subjects performed two tasks," explains Maria Richter, doctoral candidate in the department of biological and clinical psychology at Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena (FSU) in Germany. For their first task, subjects were supposed to imagine situations that correspond to the words, and as a second task, they read the words but were distracted by a brain-teasing puzzle. "In both cases we could observe a clear activation of the pain matrix in the brain by pain-associated words," Richter states. The pain-related words activated the pain-related area of the brain, while the negative words did not.

WHAT IT MEANS: Psychologists have observed that verbal stimuli seem to trigger a reaction to pain. For instance, the researchers describe how when a doctor or nurse giving a shot precedes it by saying, "Watch out, it'll hurt for a second," or "It'll just be a quick pinch," it can cause both children and adults to become uneasy and experience more pain when the needles strikes the skin. That not only makes the experience less pleasant, it also affects your reaction to subsequent situations. "After such an experience, it is enough to simply imagine a needle at the next vaccination appointment to activate our pain memory," says study author Thomas Weiss, PhD, professor of clinical psychology at FSU.