Tylenol found dimmming emotional pain as well (Photo : REUTERS/Gary Cameron)
Pain reliever Tylenol can also be in tweaking people's emotions, according to study. This is due to the acetaminophen that forms the active ingredient in the medicine.
"It kinds of flattens out the vicissitudes of your life," said Baldwin Way, a psychologist at the Ohio State University.
The experiment involved giving a double dose of Tylenol to 40 volunteers while another 40 volunteers were given placebo pills. The two groups were then asked to rate a variety of pictures that ranged from fun inducing like children playing with kittens to the depressing ones like children dying of starvation.
Those who have taken Tylenol were found to be 20 percent less happy when faced with the "happy" images and 10 percent less sad when dealing with "sad" images compared to the group that were fed with placebo.
The results are also believed to be in line with an earlier notion of the action of acetaminophen on an individual. Psychologists, Naomi Eisenberger and Nathan DeWall first suspected acetaminophen to have both a psychological and neurological effect as the substance was found to have a sort of dimming effect on the insula of the brain.
Insula is the specific region of the brain that deals with emotional pain. There already is in place enough research in place to link insula with emotional pain as those with an injury in the insula region of the brain are found to be less reactive to both positive and negative developments, according to NPR.
Researchers involved with the latest study though claims it is too early to come to anything definitive just yet.
"I'd like to know more about how it might happen," said Dr. Lewis Nelson, a medical toxicologist at NYU Langone Medical Center. "One way to think about things in medicine is to understand the biological plausibility."
Nelson warned that the new findings should not encourage greater intake of Tylenol by those looking for a means to dull their feelings, Good stated.
"This is not the kind of drug we want people to use to any sort of excess," said Nelson.
