Side effect of Tylenol painkiller: reducing positive emotions in life

Ohio University staff found that paracetamol-based drugs have a side effect on patients, reducing the proportion of positive emotions. The research method was simple. Volunteers were offered to take a medicine that turned out to be either a placebo or contained paracetamol, and showed a number of photographs with a different plot. Some photos were supposed to cause positive emotions, while others - on the contrary, negatively affect the emotional state. It turned out that volunteers who took paracetamol tablets rated their positive and negative emotions not as much as those who took placebo.

In the US, Paracetamol-based Tylenol pain reliever has been used for more than 70 years, however, a similar clinical effect was detected for the first time. In total, paracetamol is used in more than 600 different medications, and every week it is consumed by about 52 million American adults.

The study involved 82 Ohio University students who were divided into two groups. For the experiment, the authors selected 40 photographs from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) database , which are commonly used in this kind of medical research. The photos were selected so that they could be assessed as extremely negative (starving children), neutral and positive (children with cats). Volunteers took a dose of 1000 mgm of a certain substance, which was either paracetamol or a placebo-looking one, and waited 60 minutes until the medicine started its action.

It was proposed to evaluate each photo on a scale from -5 to +5 according to its plot: does the volunteer consider it negative or positive. Then it was proposed to rate the same photo on a scale from 0 to 10 according to how much emotional influence she had. After processing the results of the study, it turned out that those taking paracetamol rated most of the photographs as generally neutral, and the strength of their emotional experience was less than that of those taking placebo. The average emotional score given by those who took the harmless powder was 6.76. At the same time, volunteers who took paracetamol, rated them at 5.85.
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The equilibrium dystopian film describes a totalitarian society after World War III. Residents of the state of Libria should take a daily dose of a special drug "prozium" that suppresses human emotions. It is believed that in this way negative manifestations of their character are excluded from relations between people. The order is monitored by the special organization Tetragrammaton and its employees, who are called clerics. One day, due to circumstances, one of the clerics misses taking a daily dose of the prose ...