A new study has found that oral contraceptives, taken by nearly one-third of women in the United States and 100 million women worldwide daily, diminish their ability to empathize.
Women who use birth control pills have a 10% worse ability to read facial emotions compared to those who do not use them. Scientists discovered that while birth control pills do not affect the reading of simple emotions like sadness and joy, they reduce the ability to interpret complex emotions such as empathy and compassion. Dr. Alexander Lechki, a co-author of the study, stated: "More than 100 million women worldwide use oral contraceptives, but little is known about their impact on emotion, perception, and behavior. However, the findings indicate that oral contraceptives weaken the ability to recognize the emotional expressions of others, which may affect how users initiate and maintain intimate relationships. That is, women's ability to empathize with others can change and be negatively affected."
In the study, 42 women using birth control pills were compared to 53 women who did not use them, all of whom were tasked with identifying emotions. Dr. Lechki explained that the test was designed to capture the subtle differences in women's emotions, adding: "The significant impairments in the ability to recognize emotions among women using oral contraceptives are something we have been accustomed to and have observed frequently in our daily interactions with our partners. Our assumption revolves around the idea that these impairments can be very subtle, indicating that we need to test the emotion recognition of women through a task sensitive enough to detect such impairments. Therefore, we used a very challenging task to recognize emotions, which required identifying complex emotional expressions from the eye region of faces."
The results showed that birth control pills had no effect on reading simple facial expressions, like smiling or frowning. However, concerning more complex facial expressions, women on birth control performed 10% worse than their counterparts. Dr. Lechki explained why these findings make sense: "It is known that cyclical differences in estrogen and progesterone levels affect women's emotions and influence activity and neural connections in brain areas associated with emotion and sensation. Since oral contraceptives work by inhibiting the levels of estrogen and progesterone, it is logical that oral contraceptives also affect women's recognition of emotions and their interactions with us."
