TY  - JOUR
A1  - Pahnke, Rike
A1  - Mau-Möller, Anett
A1  - Junge, Martin
A1  - Wendt, Julia
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
A1  - Lischke, Alexander
T1  - Oral Contraceptives Impair Complex Emotion Recognition in Healthy Women
JF  - Frontiers in neuroscience
N2  - 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.
KW  - oral contraceptives
KW  - menstrual cycle
KW  - estrogen
KW  - progesterone
KW  - emotion recognition
KW  - social cognition
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.01041
SN  - 1662-453X
VL  - 12
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -