News > Medscape Medical News > Psychiatry News Acetaminophen May Blunt Empathy Batya Swift Yasgur, MA, LSW April 17, 2019 Acetaminophen appears to reduce feelings of empathy in users, new research suggests. Investigators showed scenarios of positive experiences to 114 college students who had taken either acetaminophen (1000 mg) or placebo and found that those who had taken acetaminophen experienced less pleasure and empathetic feelings toward the hypothetical characters in comparison with those who had taken placebo. The ability to recognize pleasure and positivity was unaffected. "We found that acetaminophen reduced the affective, although not the cognitive, side of empathy," Dominik Mischkowski, PhD, visiting assistant professor, Department of Psychology, Ohio University, Athens, told Medscape Medical News. "But I would like to strongly emphasize that this doesn't mean you should stop recommending acetaminophen for patients who have pain — pain is a very aversive experience, and a nonprescription painkiller is still a very good tool in the toolbox," he said. The study was published online March 29 in Frontiers in Psychology. "Pure" Measure of Emotion "The data reported in this paper are part of a line of studies looking at how acetaminophen impacts social affect and social behavior — how you feel toward others and how you interact with them," Mischkowski said. "Our previous work focused on empathy with others who experience negative emotions, in which we compared people taking acetaminophen to those taking placebo in their reactions to scenarios of people experiencing negative events. In that study, we found that acetaminophen reduced empathy for pain," he added. In the current study, 114 undergraduate students at the Ohio State University were randomly assigned to receive either 1000 mg of acetaminophen (n = 59) or a placebo in liquid form (n = 55). To measure positive empathy, the investigators gave participants written scenarios. In one scenario, a man proposes to his girlfriend; in another, a man is happy that a woman he is interested in has agreed to a date; in a third, a woman gets a raise at her job; in a fourth, a woman's father comes to her music performance. Participants completed three measures of positive empathetic perceptions and affective empathy — a one-item measure of perceived positivity, a one-item measure of perceived pleasure, and a six-item measure of personal pleasure. In addition, while imagining the feelings involved in each scenario, the participants completed an established six-item measure of other-directed empathetic feelings. That tool measured the extent to which the participants felt sympathy, warmth, compassion, soft-heartedness, tenderness, and the degree to which they were moved.
