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 wom

SUBMITTER: Pahnke R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6378414 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature