Taking the pill could affect women's ability to recognize complex emotions | Life

BERLIN, Feb. 12 – New European research has found that oral contraceptive pills can very slightly alter a woman's social judgment, making it more difficult to identify more complex emotions.

Conducted by researchers from the University of Rostock, the University of Greifswald and the University of Potsdam, Germany, this new small-scale study recruited 95 healthy women, including 42 took the pill and 53, no, and asked them to perform a special task of recognition of emotions.

The results, published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, showed that both groups of women were also good at recognizing easy expressions and emotions such as happiness and fear. However, women who took the pill averaged 10% less to recognize the most complex emotional expressions, such as pride and contempt, than women who did not take the pill.

The effect remained true for positive and negative expressions, and regardless of the type of pill taken.

The team also found that the woman's menstrual cycle phase had no effect on differences in emotion recognition.

The researchers noted that the effect was subtle. The lead author, Alexander Lischke, said, "If oral contraceptives resulted in a dramatic loss of recognition of women's emotions, we would probably have noticed in our daily interactions with our partners."

"We badumed that these deficiencies would be very subtle, which indicates that we have to test the recognition of women's emotions with a task sensitive enough to detect such deficiencies. So we used a very difficult emotion recognition task that required the recognition of complex emotional expressions in the eye area of ​​the faces.

Although the pill has been badociated with various physical effects, good and bad, little is known about the psychological effects.

However, Dr. Lischke added that the results are consistent with previous research.

"Unwanted results suggest that oral contraceptives prevent one from recognizing other people's emotional expressions, which could affect how users form and maintain intimate relationships."

"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. Oral contraceptives acting by suppressing estrogen and progesterone levels, so 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 the recognition of women's emotions has not yet been elucidated. "

It is now necessary to continue research to better understand this area, says Dr. Lischke, and to help provide women with more detailed information about the potential effects of oral contraceptive use. – Relaxnews