Daily Times

Taking the pill makes women less able to read emotions in other people, according to new research.

The study found that the oral contraceptive may be blurring social judgement when it comes to discerning more subtle facial expressions.

Ninety-five women were challenged to look at black and white photographs of the eye region and select the best of four possible emotional labels that described the expression as quickly as possible.

Previous research has indicated that women on the pill are equally able to recognise more obvious expressions such as happiness or fear compared to those not on the contraceptive.

However, the new study, published in the Frontiers in Neuroscience, is significant because it is the first to study the ability to recognise more complex emotions such as pride and contempt in such detail.

It found that, on average, women on the daily pill were 10 per cent less good at making these judgments.

Dr Alexander Lischke, who led the study at the University of Greifswald in German, said: “Cyclic variations of estrogen and progesterone levels are known to affect women’s emotion recognition, and influence activity and connections in associated brain regions.

“Since oral contraceptives work by suppressing estrogen and progesterone levels, it makes sense that oral contraceptives also affect women’s emotion recognition.

“However, the exact mechanism underlying oral contraceptive induced changes in women’s emotion recognition remains to be elucidated.”

Hormonal contraceptive are one of the most studied drugs in the world in terms of their physical effects, and doctors have long known that, besides birth control, they can help control acne, heavy periods and endometriosis, as well as reducing the risk of ovarian, uterine and colon cancers.

The pill can also increase slightly the risk of breast and cervical cancer, blood clots and high blood pressure.

However, far less is known about the effect of the pill on cognition.

“If oral contraceptives caused dramatic impairments in women’s emotion recognition, we would have probably noticed this in our everyday interactions with our partners,” said Dr 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.”

Expressions had to be recognized on basis of subtle cues that were provided by the eye region of faces.

The respective pictures were shown in random order on a computer screen.

Published in Daily Times, February 13^th 2019.