 When you take acetaminophen, you don’t feel others’ pain as much The popular painkiller reduces empathy, study finds 
 
 
 
 Baldwin Way 
 
 COLUMBUS, Ohio – When you take acetaminophen to reduce your pain, you may also be decreasing your empathy for both the physical and social aches that other people experience, a new study suggests. Acetaminophen – the main ingredient in the painkiller Tylenol – is the most common drug ingredient in the United States, found in more than 600 medicines, according to the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, a trade group. In one experiment in the study, 40 healthy college students drank a liquid containing 1,000 milligrams of acetaminophen (the maximum recommended dose of Tylenol for adults over the course of a 24-hour period is 3,000 milligrams, or 6 pills per day), and another 40 college students drank a placebo solution without the drug. Obviously, the students didn't know who was drinking what. After waiting one hour for the drug to take effect, the participants read eight short scenarios in which someone suffered some sort of pain. For example, one scenario was about someone who had experienced a knife cut that went down to the bone, and another was about someone else mourning the recent death of his father. In two double-blind placebo-controlled experiments, participants rated perceived pain, personal distress, and empathic concern in response to reading physical or social pain scenarios, witnessing ostracism in the lab, or visualizing another study participant receiving painful noise blasts. [5 Surprising Facts About Pain] 
 
 In the second experiment, the researchers looked at 114 college students, who took either acetaminophen or a placebo. They were asked to rate how unpleasant it was for them and how unpleasant it would be if some other poor guy were subjected to the same. “Acetaminophen reduced the pain they felt, but it also reduced their empathy for others who were experiencing the same noise blasts,” Mischkowski said.
– If the results of a new study hold up to further research, Tylenol may have to start coming up with a new warning label: "may cause a lack of empathy." Researchers studying acetaminophen—the active painkiller in Tylenol and about 600 other medicines—found people taking it showed less empathy toward the physical and emotional pain of others, Live Science reports. This could be a big deal as nearly a quarter of American adults take some form of acetaminophen every week, notes an Ohio State press release. "If you are having an argument with your spouse and you just took acetaminophen, this research suggests you might be less understanding of what you did to hurt your spouse’s feelings," says the study's senior author, Baldwin Way. The study—published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience—consisted of multiple experiments involving stories of suffering, actual painful blasts of noise, and more, CNN reports. The results appear to confirm earlier studies of brain activity that showed empathy was somehow neurologically related to how a person processes their own pain. The results also "raise concerns about the broader social side effects of acetaminophen," says the study. “We don’t know why acetaminophen is having these effects, but it is concerning,” says Way. The researchers plan to test ibuprofen next. (Another recent study shows acetaminophen could reduce your ability to notice errors.)