The pill could be blurring your social judgement — but perhaps not enough so you’d notice.
By challenging women to identify complex emotional expressions like pride or contempt, rather than basic ones like happiness or fear, scientists have revealed subtle changes in emotion recognition associated with oral contraceptive pill (OCP) use.
Published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, their study found that OCP users were nearly 10% worse on average than non-users in deciphering the most enigmatic emotional expressions, raising questions over the possible impact of OCPs on social interactions in intimate relationships.
To further investigate the effects of OCPs on women’s emotion recognition, the researchers administered a special emotion recognition task to two similar groups of healthy women: 42 OCP users, and 53 non-users.
“If oral contraceptives caused dramatic impairments in women’s emotion recognition, we would have probably noticed this in our everyday interactions with our partners,” suggests Lischke. “We assumed that these impairments would be very subtle, indicating that we had to test women’s emotion recognition with a task that was sensitive enough to detect such impairments. We, thus, used a very challenging emotion recognition task that required the recognition of complex emotional expressions from the eye region of faces”
The results were, as expected, subtle — but very clear: OCP users were less accurate in the recognition of the most subtle complex expressions than non-users — by nearly 10%, on average.
“Whereas the groups were equally good at recognizing easy expressions, the OCP users were less likely to correctly identify difficult expressions.”
The effect held for both positive and negative expressions, and regardless of the type of OCP or the menstrual cycle phase of non-users.
More at: https://www.infowars.com/study-birth...plex-emotions/
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