Birth control pills may damage women’s ability to recognise emotions!

February 12: Birth control by taking oral contraceptive pill is a common phenomena not only in India but all throughout the world. However, a new European research has found that taking the oral contraceptive pill could very slightly impair a woman’s social judgement, making it more difficult to identify more complex emotions. The study showed that healthy women who use birth control pills are poorer judges of subtle facial expressions than non-users.

There’s been increasing evidence from both large-scale and smaller studies that the pill has a multitude of effects on women’s health, their bodies, brains, and well-being.But now new study suggests oral contraceptives could also have an impact on women’s social judgement.

Carried out by researchers at the University of Rostock, University of Greifswald, and University of Potsdam, Germany, the new small-scale study recruited 95 healthy women, including 42 who took the pill and 53 who did not, and asked them to complete a special emotion recognition task.

The findings, published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, showed that both groups of women were equally good at recognizing easy expressions and emotions, such as happiness and fear. However, women who took the pill were nearly 10 per cent worse on average in recognizing the most complex emotional expressions, such as pride and contempt, than women who didn’t take the pill.

The findings, published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, showed that OCP users were nearly 10 per cent less accurate on average than non-users in deciphering the most enigmatic emotional expressions.Further, oral contraceptives can also have a range of side effects, depending on the type of pill and the hormones that it contains. Such side effects include nausea, breast tenderness, headaches, and bloating.