Pahnke Rike, Mau-Moeller Anett, Junge Martin, Wendt Julia, Weymar Mathias, Hamm Alfons O, Lischke Alexander
Department of Sport Sciences, University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany.
Department of Orthopaedics, University Medicine Rostock, Rostock, Germany.
Front Neurosci. 2019 Feb 11;12:1041. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2018.01041. eCollection 2018.
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 ( = 42) would be less accurate in the recognition of complex emotional expressions than women who were not using OCs ( = 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.
尽管口服避孕药（OCs）被广泛使用，但对于OCs对情绪、认知和行为的影响却知之甚少。然而，一些巧合的发现表明，OCs会损害识别他人情绪表达的能力，这在人际环境中可能会产生严重后果。为了进一步研究OCs对情绪识别的影响，我们测试了正在使用OCs的女性（n = 42）在识别复杂情绪表达方面是否比未使用OCs的女性（n = 53）准确性更低。此外，我们还探讨了这些情绪识别差异是否取决于女性的月经周期阶段。我们发现，使用OCs的女性在识别复杂表情方面确实比未使用OCs的女性准确性更低，尤其是在处理难以识别的表情时。这些情绪识别差异并不取决于女性的月经周期阶段。因此，我们的研究结果表明，OCs会损害女性的情绪识别能力，在向女性告知使用OCs的副作用时应考虑到这一点。
