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General Tylenol May Decrease Empathy
2016.05.11 10:52
Tylenol may decrease empathy, study shows
USA TODAY NETWORK Ashley May, USA TODAY 2:51 p.m. EDT May 11, 2016
Popping a Tylenol might get rid of your headache, but it also could numb your feelings.
A new study published by The Ohio State University in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience shows when people took acetaminophen, the main ingredient in Tylenol, they were less likely to empathize with individuals experiencing pain or misfortune.
“Pain might actually decrease empathy as well. So, there are other factors that need to be taken into account,” said Dominik Mischkowski, co-author of the study and current post doctorate fellow at the National Institutes of Health. He added the sample size is small and researchers are continuing to study the effect.
In the first round of the study, 80 college students read eight different scenarios. Half of the group consumed 1,000 mg of acetaminophen. The group that took the pain medication rated the scenarios as less severe than those that did not take the medication. A second experiment surveyed 114 college students and showed similar results.
“If you are having an argument with your spouse and you just took acetaminophen, this research suggests you might be less understanding of what you did to hurt your spouse's feelings." said Baldwin Way, the senior author of the study, to Science Daily.
Acetaminophen is the most common drug ingredient in the United States, found in more than 600 medicines, according to the Consumer Healthcare Products Association. About 23% of U.S. adults use a medication that contains acetaminophen weekly.
Even the empathy doctors and clergy people talk about and live with as part of their profession is being analyzed by the neuroscientists)
Empathy for the social suffering of friends and strangers recruits distinct patterns of brain activation
Meghan L. Meyer1, Carrie L. Masten2, Yina Ma3, Chenbo Wang3, Zhenhao Shi3, Naomi I. Eisenberger1 and Shihui Han3,*
+ Author Affiliations
1UCLA Psychology Department, 2Department of Psychological Sciences, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240, USA, and 3Department of Psychology, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Road, Beijing 100871, P. R. China
↵*Correspondence should be addressed to Shihui Han, Ph. D., Department of Psychology, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Road, P. R. China. E-mail: shan@pku.edu.cn
Received September 25, 2011.
Accepted February 7, 2012.
Abstract
Humans observe various peoples’ social suffering throughout their lives, but it is unknown whether the same brain mechanisms respond to people we are close to and strangers’ social suffering. To address this question, we had participant’s complete functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while observing a friend and stranger experience social exclusion. Observing a friend’s exclusion activated affective pain regions associated with the direct (i.e. firsthand) experience of exclusion [dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and insula], and this activation correlated with self-reported self-other overlap with the friend. Alternatively, observing a stranger’s exclusion activated regions associated with thinking about the traits, mental states and intentions of others [‘mentalizing’; dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), precuneus, and temporal pole]. Comparing activation from observing friend’s vs stranger’s exclusion showed increased activation in brain regions associated with the firsthand experience of exclusion (dACC and anterior insula) and with thinking about the self [medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC)]. Finally, functional connectivity analyses demonstrated that MPFC and affective pain regions activated in concert during empathy for friends, but not strangers. These results suggest empathy for friends’ social suffering relies on emotion sharing and self-processing mechanisms, whereas empathy for strangers’ social suffering may rely more heavily on mentalizing systems.