Source: Wikimedia Commons Colin from Los Angeles, USAderivative work

A while back, I wrote a blog entry on studies demonstrating that acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) can dampen people’s responses to negative events. So, if you experience social pain, you may actually be able to medicate yourself for it in the same way that you take pain killers for a headache.

A paper by Geoffrey Durso, Andrew Luttrell, and Baldwin Way in the June, 2015 issue of Psychological Science carries this work further. They were interested in how Tylenol could have this influence on emotional response.

One possibility they suggest is that acetaminophen interferes with the brain’s ability to experience extreme emotions in general. If you think about your emotions, there is both a valence (whether the emotion is good or bad) and an intensity (how strongly that emotion is felt). So, you can be a little happy, or you can be elated. You can be miffed or really angry. Perhaps Tylenol dampens the intensity of emotions.

To test this possibility, participants were given 1000mg of acetominophen or a . That is the amount of acetaminophen in two normal tablets for adults. After a sixty minute waiting period, participants were shown pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). These pictures have been normed in studies for the emotional response they trigger. Pictures were selected across the range from very negative to neutral to very positive. Participants rated how negatively or positively they felt about the picture as well as the strength of their emotional response.

In one study as a control condition participants also viewed the pictures and rated how much blue there was in the pictures. That is a judgment that is not expected to be affected by the emotional response to the picture.

The results are fairly straightforward. Participants who took acetaminophen rated both very positive and very negative items as less extreme than those who took the placebo. Those who took acetaminophen also gave lower ratings for emotional strength, particularly for the most extreme items. That is, acetaminophen seems to have blunted the strength of all emotional responses.

But, acetaminophen did not affect every kind of rating. When participants rated how much blue there was in the pictures, the ratings were the same both for the acetaminophen and the control group.

It is important to recognize, though, that these effects are small. Overall, extreme reactions are blunted about a half a scale point compared to the control group. This is to be expected, of course. If over-the-counter pain medications eliminated all emotional reactions, we would know that already.

Finally, findings like this may help neuroscientists to look at the brain circuits involved in creating emotional intensity. Once we begin to understand what chemicals influence particular elements of psychological experience, we can begin to trace the circuits that are responsible for those elements of experience.

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