Titled Oral Contraceptives Impair Complex Emotion Recognition in Healthy Women, the study stated, “Despite the widespread use of oral contraceptives (OCs), remarkably little is known about the effects of OCs on emotion, cognition, and behaviour. We assumed that these impairments would be very subtle, indicating that we had to test women’s emotion recognition with a task that was sensitive enough to detect such impairments. On a more specific note, women who took the pill were 10 percent less accurate in their emotion recognition than women who did not take the pill. Since oral contraceptives work by suppressing estrogen and progesterone levels, it makes sense that oral contraceptives also affect women’s emotion recognition. However, the exact mechanism underlying oral contraceptive-induced changes in women’s emotion recognition remains to be elucidated.”

Source: Indian Express February 17, 2019 09:00 UTC