Tylenol Might Dull Emotional Pain Too

"A common pain medication might make you go from "so cute!" to "so what?" when you look at a photo of a kitten. And it might make you less sensitive to horrifying things, too. It's acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. Researchers say the drug might be taking the edge off emotions — not just pain."

"'It seems to take the highs off your daily highs and the lows off your daily lows,' says Baldwin Way, a psychologist at Ohio State University and the principal investigator on the study. 'It kind of flattens out the vicissitudes of your life.'"

"The idea that over-the-counter pain pills might affect emotions has been circulating since 2010, when two psychologists, Naomi Eisenberger and Nathan DeWall, led a study showing that acetaminophen seemed to be having both a psychological and a neurological effect on people. They asked volunteers to play a rigged game that simulated social rejection. Not only did the acetaminophen appear to be deflecting social anxieties, but it also seemed to be dimming activity in the insula, a region of the brain involved in processing emotional pain."