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Many millennials spend a significant portion of their adult lives taking oral contraceptives to prevent pregnancy. Birth control pills can help control acne, heavy periods and endometriosis. They also reduce the risk of developing certain cancers. But these little pills can also cause some of the hard side effects to some women, such as weight gain, anxiety and high blood pressure. And this month, a new study from the University of Greifswald in Germany has revealed another problem that we might be concerned about: contraceptive pills could blur your emotional recognition.
The new study, which has just appeared in Frontiers in Neurosciencebuilds on previous research on the psychological consequences of taking oral contraceptives. We already know that women who take oral contraceptives tend to choose men different from those they would not take if they did not take the pills, and birth control can significantly affect Mood of some women. But this new study goes further by questioning how oral contraceptives affect our social and emotional intelligence.
In the new study, researchers looked at two similar groups of healthy women ages 18 to 35, some using oral contraceptives and others not. At first, the researchers found no dramatic psychological difference between the two groups of women.
"If oral contraceptives greatly altered the recognition of women's emotions, we would probably have noticed in our daily interactions with our partners," said Dr. Alexander Lischke, lead author of the study, in a statement. Press. "We badumed that these deficiencies would be very subtle, which means that we had to test the recognition of women's emotions with a task sensitive enough to detect them – the area of the eyes of the faces".
The Lischke team found that both groups were equally apt to recognize simple black and white facial expressions on a computer during an emotional recognition test. However, women who took oral contraceptives were on average 10% worse than non-users in interpreting their emotions when facial expressions became more complex. In other words, women using oral contraceptives were more likely to misinterpret social cues related to the recognition of more nuanced and complicated emotions. They had a particularly difficult time reading complex negative facial expressions, according to the study.
What could cause this subtle difference? This has to do with the hormones that these contraceptives handle. Hormones are chemicals that carry messages from your brain to the rest of your body. They help control and regulate basic human functions such as eating and sleeping, as well as more complex processes such as your emotions and mood. According to Lischke and his team, all women experience natural and cyclical variations in hormones such as estrogen and progesterone levels during the month. More importantly, at certain times in your menstrual cycle, estrogen and progesterone levels reach levels that cause you to be more emotionally sensitive to others. (On an evolutionary level, it is useful for you to be more aware of the emotions of someone else – especially those that are dear to you – at the time you are most fertile. ) But oral contraceptives usually suppress the levels of estrogen and progesterone. In the absence of normal levels of these hormones in their system, some women may have difficulty interpreting complex emotional cues.
This is a subtle but important conclusion, according to Lischke, although he said that further research was needed to determine if the contraceptive pill was making it harder for women to get pregnant. Initiation and maintenance of intimate relationships. If this is the case, we will all want to take additional steps to weigh the pros and cons of using oral contraceptives. And anyway, you should always spend time researching methods of contraception before choosing one (there are many alternatives without a pill!) And at the consultation of a health professional before decide which contraception option is best for you.
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