Acetaminophen – a potent physical painkiller that also reduces empathy for other people’s suffering – blunts physical and social pain by reducing activation in brain areas (i.e. anterior insula and anterior cingulate) thought to ...
Given how commonly the drug is used, that’s quite the social experiment we’re running.
Acetaminophen did not alter any of the ERPs, in contrast to predictions based on prior research. Exploratory analyses revealed that acetaminophen reduced the relationship between trait behavioral inhibition system sensitivity and emotion-modulated late positive potentials. Together these findings suggest that a standard dose of acetaminophen did not reliably alter neural indicators of emotional or feedback processing. Instead, preliminary findings from our study suggested that a more nuanced relationship may exist between acetaminophen and individual differences in emotional processing, although this latter finding calls for further replication.
This study is from 2019 and in the study they state that more testing is required to confirm these findings.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33608841/ This is a related study: Emphasis is mine
So I wouldn’t say this is fully confirmed yet.
I guess these things are inherently difficult to test, so we’ll probably see more research around this.