Pain Relievers May Cause You to Feel Less Positive Emotions

Do you use pain relievers? Then you may not be as happy as you could be. Scientists have found that a commonly used pain reliever, acetaminophen, actually blunts positive emotions.

Acetaminophen is the main ingredient in the over-the-counter pain reliever, Tylenol. It's been in use for more than 70 years, but it's only now that researchers have discovered this new side effect.

Previous research has shown that acetaminophen not only works on physical pain, but also on psychological pain. This study takes the results one step further by showing that it also reduces how much users actually feel positive emotions.

The researchers conducted two studies of college students. In the first study, half of the students took a dose of acetaminophen and half took a placebo. After 60 minutes, they were then shown 40 photographs that ranged from the extremely unpleasant to neutral to very pleasant. The volunteers then had to rate how positive or negative the photo was. In the end, it turns out that those who took the placebo had less of an emotional response to the images.

That's not all, either. Those who took the drug also didn't seem to realize that their emotions were impacted by it. The results suggest that acetaminophen affects our emotional evaluations and not our magnitude judgments in general.

The findings offer support to a relatively new theory that states that common factors may influence how sensitive we are to both the bad as well as the good things in life.

"There is accumulating evidence that some people are more sensitive to big life events of all kinds, rather than just vulnerable to bad events," said Geoffrey Durso, one of the researchers, in a news release.

The findings are published in the journal Psychological Science.

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