You have finally done it: climbed to the top of Everest, success beating through your chest, and you gaze out from the highest place on Earth — and feel nothing. Are you too tired to enjoy it, or is it not as impressive as you had hoped? According to a new study, it may have been the Tylenol you popped on the way.
Acetaminophen (also known as paracetamol), the main ingredient in Tylenol, may actually subdue happiness, according to a new study published in the journal Psychological Science. While scientists have known for awhile that acetaminophen has the ability to blunt psychological pain, the new study found that it also blunts happiness, leading researchers to believe that acetaminophen may subtly blunt experience altogether.
Doctoral student in social psychology at Ohio State University Geoffrey Durso and a team of researchers gathered 82 Ohio State students, breaking them into a control group and a group given 1,000 milligrams of Tylenol (3,000 milligrams is the maximum suggested dose in a day on the Tylenol bottle). An hour later, once the drug had taken full effect, the students were then asked to rate their feelings when viewing 40 photographs according to how pleasant or unpleasant they were, on a scale from +5 to -5. The pictures showed scenes ranging from kids with kittens to people starving.
What they found was that students that had taken the acetaminophen rated all photographs less intensely on average in both pleasant and unpleasant categories. Specifically, researchers averaged the scores and found that, out of 10, while the control group had a score of 6.76 in emotional response, the acetaminophen group had a score of 5.85.
Curious if acetaminophen affected other areas of cognition, Durso and his team issued a similarly structured follow-up study with 85 participants, but asked how much blue they saw in a given photograph. There was no difference between the control group and the acetaminophen group, suggesting that the drug only effects emotions.
Durso is not sure how exactly acetaminophen manages to blunt your emotions, and other pain killers such as ibuprofen have yet to be tested for any joy-blunting effects. But Durso said his team is willing to explore these questions as well.
Eric Larsen, adventuring and venturing on the kinds of things that should be filling you with positive emotion–not numbness:
https://youtu.be/ApTVgkGB19A
