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Painkillers reduce empathy

01.06.2016

One of the most popular pain relievers is acetaminophen, commercially known as Tylenol. Acetaminophen is an ingredient in several hundred medications. In the United States, 52 million people take it in one form or another every week. Researchers at Ohio State University have found that acetaminophen has a rather odd and not-so-good side effect.

The experiment involved 80 healthy young people: half of them were asked to take acetaminophen (the maximum single dose that is usually prescribed), while the other half were given a placebo. An hour later, both of them read several short stories that told about people suffering from physical pain or from mental wounds. Readers were required to indicate how much they felt the characters in the stories were suffering. And it turned out that after the painkiller, the severity of feelings for others decreased - that is, for those who took acetaminophen, it seemed that the heroes of sad stories did not suffer so much.

In the second experiment with another group of students, they did the following: they were also given an analgesic and a placebo, and then they were forced to listen to several very strong sound signals, unpleasant to the ear, in a row. Then they had to say how unpleasant the sound was - for themselves and for someone else who would also hear it.

The researchers concluded that after acetaminophen, the acuity of sensations decreased: those who drank painkillers did not suffer as much from loud noises compared to those who did not drink it. And the same thing happened with the experience of other people's sensations: after the analgesic, it seemed that the other person was not so unpleasant either.

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