Heena Sharma Blog

Despite the widespread use of oral contraceptives (OCPs) by women, many are not aware that it may impair their ability to recognise others' emotional expressions, which may have serious consequences in interpersonal contexts, suggests a new study. The study showed that healthy women who use birth control pills are poorer judges of subtle facial expressions than non-users. "More than 100 million women worldwide use oral contraceptives, but remarkably little is known about their effects on emotion, cognition and behaviour," said senior author Alexander Lischke from the University of Greifswald in Germany. "However, coincidental findings suggest that oral contraceptives impair the ability to recognise emotional expressions of others which could affect the way users initiate and maintain intimate relationships," said Lischke. To investigate the effects of OCPs on women's emotion recognition, the researchers administered a special emotion recognit...

Contrary to popular belief, aggressive behaviour brings emotional pain to sadists, a recent study has observed. People with sadistic personality traits tend to be aggressive, but only enjoy their aggressive acts if it harms their victims. However, according to a series of studies conducted on 2000 people, these actions ultimately leave sadists feeling worse than they felt before their actions. " Sadistic tendencies don't just exist in serial killers, but in everyday people and are strongly-linked to greater aggressive behaviour," said David Chester, lead author of the study which is published in the Journal of Society for Personality and Social Psychology. In the real world, a sadist might be someone bullying others to feel better, or a group of sports fans looking for rival fans to fight for the "excitement" of it. In a lab setting, as part of the study, the scientists gauged people's aggressive and sadistic tendencies by measuring pa...