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Study: Tylenol blunts not just pain but happy and sad emotions

Acetaminophen and emotions

Researchers split up 82 college students, giving half of them 1,000 milligrams of acetaminophen, considered a strong dose. The other half got a placebo that looked identical to the real acetaminophen tablets taken by the others. Researchers then waited 60 minutes while the medication took effect.

Next the research team showed all 82 participants a series of 40 photographs from the International Affective Picture System, a data base of photos intended to draw out emotional responses. A press release from the university explained the photos and the results.

“The photographs ranged from the extremely unpleasant (crying, malnourished children) to the neutral (a cow in a field) to the very pleasant (young children playing with cats),” the release said.

“After viewing each photo, participants were asked to rate how positive or negative the photo was on a scale of -5 (extremely negative) to +5 (extremely positive). They then viewed the same photos again and were asked to rate how much the photo made them feel an emotional reaction, from 0 (little or no emotion) to 10 (extreme amount of emotion).”

Here’s what they found: the 41 students who took acetaminophen rated the photos less-emotionally than the others. In comparison to the placebo group, the acetaminophen takers ranked the sad photos less sad and happy ones less happy. Further, the acetaminophen group did not report feeling as emotional while viewing the photos as did the placebo group.

“People who took the placebo rated their level of emotion relatively high (average score of 6.76) when they saw the most emotionally jarring photos of the malnourished child or the children with kittens,” the press release said.

“People taking acetaminophen didn’t feel as much in either direction, reporting an average level of emotion of 5.85 when they saw the extreme photos. Neutral photos were rated similarly by all participants.”

Tylenol: “emotion reliever”

A second similar study was done with the same results, leading researchers to conclude that acetaminophen “affects our emotional evaluations.” The research team is the first to suggest such a result from Tylenol, which has been on the market for 70 years, and they plan to conduct similar studies with pain relievers such as aspirin and ibuprofen.

Lead author of the study, Geoffrey Durso is a doctoral student in social psychology at Ohio State and he conducted the research with graduate student Andrew Luttrell and assistant professor of psychology, Baldwin Way. They published the results in the journal Psychological Science.

“This means that using Tylenol or similar products might have broader consequences than previously thought,” Durso said. “Rather than just being a pain reliever, acetaminophen can be seen as an all-purpose emotion reliever.”

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