Acetaminophen or Paracetamol, the drug found in popular painkiller Tylenol and various other formulations affects empathy, according to a recent study. The study was conducted by researchers at Ohio state university.
“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.
The study was done by Mischkowski along with Baldwin Way, who is an 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 Ohio State.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. It is very important for us to see the other person’s perspective as well. Acetaminophen along with blunting our pain, blunts empathy as well. A person who has taken the drug is far less likely to feel the pain of others as well.
Two experiments for conducted, the first one involved 80 college students, half of whom drank a liquid containing 1000 mg acetaminophen and half who drank a placebo without the drug. This was conducted as a blind test, the students did not know which group they were in. an hour later, the students were given 8 short scenarios involving some pain to a person and were asked to rate pain from 1 to 5. The group who took acetaminophen rated the pain lower than those who did not.
The researchers conducted two experiments, the first involving 80 college students. At the beginning, half the students drank a liquid containing 1000 mg of acetaminophen, while the other half took a placebo solution that contained no drug. The students didn’t know which group they were in.
After waiting one hour for the drug to take effect, the participants read eight short scenarios in which someone suffered some sort of pain. For example, one scenario was about a person who suffered a knife cut that went down to the bone and another was about a person experiencing the death of his father.
Participants rated the pain each person in the scenarios experienced from 1 (no pain at all) to 5 (worst possible pain). They also rated how much the protagonists in the scenarios felt hurt, wounded and pained.
Overall, the participants who took acetaminophen rated the pain of the people in the scenarios to be less severe than did those who took the placebo.
The second was a similar test involving 114 students divided into two. They received white noise blasts ranging from 75 to 105 decibels and were asked to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10. They were also asked how much pain it might cause in another participant. The participants on acetaminophen rated it as less unpleasant for both themselves and others.
“Acetaminophen reduced the pain they felt, but it also reduced their empathy for others who were experiencing the same noise blasts,” Mischkowski said.
The researchers are also interested in studying if ibuprofen, another pain medication, may have similar effects.
Journal Reference:
Mischkowski D, Crocker J, Way BM. From painkiller to empathy killer: acetaminophen (paracetamol) reduces empathy for pain. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2016;11(9):1345-1353. DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsw
