COLUMBUS – When you take Tylenol to reduce your pain you may also be decreasing your empathy and other positive emotions, according to research at Ohio State.
Researchers at OSU found that when participants who took acetaminophen learned about the physical pain or the misfortunes of others, they thought they experienced less pain and suffering, compared to those who took no painkiller.
“These findings suggest other people’s pain doesn’t seem as big of a deal to you when you’ve taken acetaminophen,” said Dominik Mischkowski, co-author of the study and a former Ph.D. student at Ohio State, now at the National Institutes of Health.
Mischkowski conducted the study with Baldwin Way, assistant professor of psychology and member of the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center’s Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research, and Jennifer Crocker, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Social Psychology and professor of psychology at OSU.
Their results were published online in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
The lack of compassion among the subjects extended to emotional discomfort too.
“Those who took acetaminophen showed a reduction in empathy. They weren’t as concerned about the rejected person’s hurt feelings.” Way said.
Acetaminophen, the main ingredient in Tylenol and more than 600 other medications, is the most common drug ingredient in the U.S, with about 52 million Americans taking some form of it every week, according to the Consumer Health Care Products Association.
The researchers are also beginning to study ibuprofen, another common pain reliever.
In a previous study, Way and other colleagues found that acetaminophen also blunts positive emotions like joy.
In a 2004 study, researchers discovered that the part of the brain that was activated as subjects were experiencing pain was the same as the part that was active when they were imagining other people feeling the same pain.