Effects of Aspirin on Emotional Responses and Emotion Enhanced Memory
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Date
2020-05
Authors
Weisenseel, Zachary
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
The over-the-counter, pain-relieving drugs acetaminophen and ibuprofen have previously been shown to have effects on emotion. Specifically, these drugs cause the blunting of evaluations and reactions to both positive and negative stimuli (Durso, Luttrell, & Way, 2015; Keaveney, Peters, & Way, under review). In order to identify the biochemical mechanism underlying these emotion blunting effects, we proposed to study the effects of the drug Aspirin. These drugs all produce their pain relieving effects by inhibiting the cyclooxygenase (COX) enzyme. However, there are two different isoforms of the enzyme: cyclooxygenase 1 (COX-1) and cyclooxygenase 2 (COX-2). Acetaminophen primarily inhibits COX-2 while ibuprofen is non-selective. Therefore, it is currently unclear whether emotion blunting effects are specific only to the COX-2 isoform, or if both isoforms contribute. The drug Aspirin is also a COX inhibiting drug; however, Aspirin is COX-1 selective. To test whether emotion blunting effects are primarily influenced by COX-2 inhibition, we tested if a 500mg pain-relieving dose of Aspirin influenced responses to psychological tasks. 135 male participants (mean age: 19.20; 58% White, 22% Asian, 5% African American, 4% Hispanic, 9% Multiracial/Other) were randomly assigned to either Aspirin or placebo groups. After 60 minutes of uptake time, participants completed two tasks designed to measure response to and memory of emotional stimuli, respectively. In the first task, participants rated 60 emotionally evocative images for valence (i.e. evaluations) and 60 emotionally evocative images for arousal (i.e. emotional reaction). After a 5-minute distractor task, participants completed a memory task where they were re-presented with 45 images from the prior task as well as 135 new images, in order to determine if Aspirin blunted the enhanced recognition of emotional images. Participants indicated whether each image had been previously viewed in the original task or was a new image. In contrast to the original hypothesis, Aspirin increased reactions to the negative stimuli and increased overall memory recognition, with the latter effects approaching statistical significance. These results could suggest that COX-1 and COX-2 potentially have opposite roles in emotional responses, with the inhibition of COX-1 causing emotion enhancement (at least towards negative stimuli) and COX-2 inhibition causing emotion blunting.
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Keywords
Aspirin, Emotion, Emotional responses, Memory, Memory recognition