Oral contraceptives may be detrimental to women's recognition of their complex emotions

The pill could blur your social judgment – but maybe not enough to make you notice. By inviting women to identify complex emotional expressions such as pride or contempt, rather than elemental expressions such as happiness or fear, scientists have revealed subtle changes in the recognition of emotions badociated with the Use of the oral contraceptive pill. Posted in Frontiers in Neuroscience, their study found that OCP users were nearly 10% less average than non-users in deciphering the most enigmatic emotional expressions, raising questions about the potential impact of OCPs on social interactions in the workplace. intimate relationships.

What are the risks and benefits of using OCP?

Women who choose to take an oral contraceptive have access to a great deal of reliable information about the potential physical effects.

In addition to birth control, hormonal contraceptives can help control acne, heavy periods and endometriosis, as well as reduce the risk of ovarian, uterine and colon cancers. In contrast, the pill may slightly increase the risk of bad and cervical cancer, blood clots and hypertension.

But the psychological effects of the use of OCP are less well documented.

"More than 100 million women worldwide use oral contraceptives, but their effects on emotions, cognition and behavior are poorly understood," says Dr. Alexander Lischke, lead author of the study, of the 39, University of Greifswald, Germany.

"However, fortuitous findings suggest that oral contraceptives prevent one from recognizing the emotional expressions of others, which could affect how users form and maintain intimate relationships."

OCP users have a harder time recognizing subtle expressions of complex emotions

To further investigate the effects of PCOs on the recognition of women's emotions, the researchers badigned a special task of recognizing emotions to two similar groups of healthy women: 42 OCP users and 53 non-users .

"If oral contraceptives resulted in a dramatic loss of emotion recognition in women, we would probably have noticed in our daily interactions with our partners," suggests Lischke. "We badumed that these deficiencies would be very subtle, indicating that we had to test the recognition of women's emotions with a sufficiently sensitive task to detect them, so we used a very difficult task of recognizing emotions that required recognition of expressions of the region of the eyes of the faces "

The results were, as expected, subtle – but very clear: OCP users were less accurate in recognizing the more subtle complex expressions than non-users – by almost 10% on average.

"While groups were also good at recognizing simple expressions, OCP users were less likely to correctly identify difficult expressions."

The effect is valid for positive and negative expressions, regardless of the type of OCP or the phase of the menstrual cycle of nonusers.

Should clinical guidelines change?

According to Lischke, the results are consistent with previous research.

"Cyclic variations in estrogen and progesterone levels are known to affect the recognition of women's emotions and influence activity and connections in the badociated brain regions." Since oral contraceptives act by suppressing the levels Estrogen and progesterone, it makes sense that oral contraceptives also affect the recognition of women's emotions.However, the exact mechanism underlying the changes induced by oral contraception in women in the recognition of their emotions remains to be seen. elucidate. "

He emphasized the need for further studies that replicate and develop the results of this study before considering changes to current OCP prescribing guidelines.

"Further studies are needed to determine whether impairments induced by oral contraception in the recognition of emotions depend on the type, duration or timing of use and should also determine whether these alterations actually alter the women's ability to build and maintain relationships To be true, we should provide women with more detailed information about the consequences of using oral contraception. "

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