Oral Contraceptives Impair Complex Emotion Recognition in Healthy Women

Abstract

Despite the widespread use of oral contraceptives (OCs), remarkably little is known about the effects of OCs on emotion, cognition, and behavior. However, coincidental findings suggest that OCs impair the ability to recognize others’ emotional expressions, which may have serious consequences in interpersonal contexts. To further investigate the effects of OCs on emotion recognition, we tested whether women who were using OCs (n = 42) would be less accurate in the recognition of complex emotional expressions than women who were not using OCs (n = 53). In addition, we explored whether these differences in emotion recognition would depend on women’s menstrual cycle phase. We found that women with OC use were indeed less accurate in the recognition of complex expressions than women without OC use, in particular during the processing of expressions that were difficult to recognize. These differences in emotion recognition did not depend on women’s menstrual cycle phase. Our findings, thus, suggest that OCs impair women’s emotion recognition, which should be taken into account when informing women about the side-effects of OC use.

Effects of Oral Contraceptive Androgenicity on Visuospatial and Social-Emotional Cognition: A Prospective Observational Trial

“…Facial emotion recognition/processing has been associated with a female advantage [57], and a role for sex hormones has been implicated [58]. The few existing studies that have specifically examined facial emotion recognition and OC use have reported both impaired emotion recognition in OC users versus nonusers [41][42][43] as well as no difference between OC users and nonusers [44]. It has been suggested that OC use may impair the capacity to recognize complex emotional expressions [43].…”

“…The few existing studies that have specifically examined facial emotion recognition and OC use have reported both impaired emotion recognition in OC users versus nonusers [41][42][43] as well as no difference between OC users and nonusers [44]. It has been suggested that OC use may impair the capacity to recognize complex emotional expressions [43]. OC users have previously demonstrated a stronger neural response to faces with angry and ambiguous expressions in the right fusiform face area when compared to freely cycling women [59], and one previous study reported that androgenic and anti-androgenic OCs differentially modulate grey matter volume in regions associated with neutral face recognition [60].…”

“…OC users demonstrate a pattern whereby salivary cortisol levels remain high, relative to OC nonusers, across a control and stressor (TSST) condition (i.e., a lack of a cortisol response following the stressor), and this effect is maintained during both the active and inactive pill phases [40]. In relation to emotion recognition, OC users have been demonstrated to have less accurate recognition of negative and complex emotional expressions as compared to nonusers in some studies [41][42][43] but not others [44]. OC users have also been demonstrated to have better affective responsiveness (a measure of empathy) as compared to nonusers and users in the inactive pill phase [44].…”

Effects of Hormonal Contraceptives on Mood: A Focus on Emotion Recognition and Reactivity, Reward Processing, and Stress Response

“…The ability to correctly recognize emotional content from faces represents one major component of nonverbal communication [46], and impairments in this ability may play an important role in the development and maintenance of depressive symptoms [47, 48]. Several studies found impaired emotion recognition in OC-users [21, 22], particularly for negative emotions [23–25], compared with naturally cycling women. For example, Pahnke and colleagues [21] report overall facial emotion recognition deficits in OC-users independent of emotional valence during the Reading-the-Mind-in-the-Eyes task, whereas Hamstra and colleagues [23, 24] identified a negativity bias in emotion recognition and emotional memory during a facial expression recognition task and an emotional categorization and memory task, respectively.…”

COMTVal158Met Genotype Affects Complex Emotion Recognition in Healthy Men and Women

“…Participants had to select the label that best described the emotional expression by pressing a corresponding button as fast as possible. Similar as in previous studies (Hysek et al, 2012; Lischke et al, 2017; Pahnke et al, 2018), an established algorithm was used to determine the percentage of correctly identified positive, negative and neutral expressions on basis of participants’ responses (Harkness et al, 1999).…”