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According to new research, taking birth control pills the woman's ability to read the emotions of others.
The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, found that the oral contraceptive can blur social judgment when it comes to detecting more subtle facial expressions.
To carry out the study, a team of researchers from the University of Greifswalk, Germany, examined 95 healthy women aged 18 to 35 years. 42 of the participants took the pill, the other 53 did not.
The group was shown 37 black and white images showing the area around the eyes on people's faces. Each image was accompanied by four labels each describing a complex emotional expression, such as "pride" or "contempt". The women were then asked to choose the expression they best described as quickly as possible.
The results showed that while those who took the oral contraceptive were able to tell whether a person was happy or scared, they were 10% less likely to decipher facial expressions of pride and contempt than their peers.
"Women using an oral contraceptive can be specifically affected when treating negative expressions difficult to recognize," the study says.
Dr. Alexander Lischke, lead author of the study, noted that because of this, the pill could hurt relationships.
"More than 100 million women worldwide use oral contraceptives, but very little is known about their effects on emotions, cognition and behavior," Lischke said.
"The findings suggest that oral contraceptives interfere with the ability to recognize the emotional expressions of others, which could affect the way users initiate and maintain intimate relationships."
Although the researchers used a "very difficult emotion recognition task", the results showed that the pill was powerful enough to strongly influence the user's emotions.
The researchers concluded that the difficulty in distinguishing the emotions of the users of the pill was due to various female hormones, including estrogen and progesterone. For this reason, they suggested that weakening of emotion recognition should be listed as a side effect of pill use.
Lischke points out that, even if the findings of the study are "clear", further research is needed to determine whether the effect of the pill on the recognition of women's emotions depends on the type of pill that they have. they take, from the duration of their treatment. taking it for, and what time of day they take it.
"If that happens to be true, we should provide women with more detailed information about the consequences of using an oral contraceptive," he said.
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