“Your pain reliever may also be diminishing your joy”
“In the study, participants who took acetaminophen reported less strong emotions when they saw both very pleasant and very disturbing photos, when compared to those who took placebos.
Acetaminophen, the main ingredient in the over-the-counter pain reliever Tylenol, has been in use for more than 70 years in the United States, but this is the first time that this side effect has been documented.
Previous research had shown that acetaminophen works not only on physical pain, but also on psychological pain. This study takes those results one step further by showing that it also reduces how much users actually feel positive emotions, said Geoffrey Durso, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in social psychology at The Ohio State University…
Way said people in the study who took the pain reliever didn’t appear to know they were reacting differently…
Each week about 23 percent of American adults (about 52 million people) use a medicine containing acetaminophen, the CHPA reports…
this study offers support to a relatively new theory that says that common factors may influence how sensitive we are to both the bad as well as the good things in life.”
This is just all kinds of interesting.
I definitely agree with this theory of emotional sensitivity: Both pointing out that the capacity for negative emotion mirrors the capacity for positive emotion, and the idea that physical and emotional pain are linked. It sort of makes sense that the emotional pain system would evolve to use the same structures as the physical pain system, instead of creating a new system for the same thing. And thinking about how many narcotics started out as physical-pain drugs.
And it’s also really, really interesting to think about all the drugs that American society sort of expects people to use, instead of expecting people to have healthier lives that cause less pain and stress. Like, how we use caffeine; how cocaine and ritalin have been expectations in certain academic and corporate fields. And then alcohol at night to bring you down, get you to sleep, and start over again. There is recreation and then there is medication.
