Your pain reliever may also be diminishing your joy

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-04/osu-ypr041315.php

Public Release: 13-Apr-2015
Ohio State University

Researchers studying the commonly used pain reliever acetaminophen found it has a previously unknown side effect: It blunts positive emotions.

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.

"This means that using Tylenol or similar products might have broader consequences than previously thought," Durso said.

"Rather than just being a pain reliever, acetaminophen can be seen as an all-purpose emotion reliever."

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Way said people in the study who took the pain reliever didn't appear to know they were reacting differently. "Most people probably aren't aware of how their emotions may be impacted when they take acetaminophen," he said.

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At this point, the researchers don't know if other pain relievers such as ibuprofen and aspirin have the same effect, although they plan on studying that question, Durso said.

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But 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.

That means the person who is more devastated by a divorce may thrive more than others when they get a promotion at work or have some other extremely positive event happen.

In this study, acetaminophen may have tapped into the sensitivity that makes some people react differently to both positive and negative life events.

"There is accumulating evidence that some people are more sensitive to big life events of all kinds, rather than just vulnerable to bad events," Durso said.