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Mind Reading
Ecstasy Improves “Mind-Reading,” But Only for Positive Emotions
Ecstasy improves your ability to detect positive emotions in someone's face.
Posted August 6, 2012
Ecstasy is most well known as a party drug that makes you really friendly, but recently it has received attention for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Several studies showed psychotherapy produced greater success when patients were also given ecstasy, and in 2010, the FDA approved ecstasy’s use in the US for this purpose. A new study from the University of Basel in Switzerland may explain ecstasy’s dual role as a party-catalyst and therapeutic.
Ecstasy may skew emotional detection by fitting our vision of someone’s mood with rose-colored glasses. Ecstasy improves mind-reading—your ability to correctly guess what someone is feeling by reading their facial expression—but only for positive emotions. After taking ecstasy, you are more likely to know someone is happy if she smiles, but less likely to notice a frown.
In this study, Cedric Hysek, Gregor Domes and Matthias Liechti tested mind-reading with the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task, or RMET. The RMET was developed by autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of Borat comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen) as a tool to detect autism spectrum disorders, which are characterized by difficulty understanding what other people are feeling.
The RMET consists of viewing 36 pairs of eyes, each expressing a different emotion (example below; take the full test here). Each pair of eyes has four options of possible emotions, but only one is correct. The average score is about 25, but people with autism spectrum disorders tend to score lower. Highly empathic people score best, getting over 30 correct, and this may reflect their emotional intelligence. Domes previously used this task to show that oxytocin improves mind-reading--people scored a few points better on the RMET after taking oxytocin.
What emotion do these eyes convey? a. aghast b. fantasizing c. impatient d. alarmed
In this study, Hysek recruited 48 participants and had them complete the RMET on two days, once after taking ecstasy and once after taking a placebo. Dosing was double-blind. Because ecstasy increases sociability, the authors thought that it would improve RMET scores compared to placebo. Such an improvement would indicate that the reason ecstasy makes someone sociable is because it improves empathy.
That’s not what they found, though. Overall scores did not differ between ecstasy and placebo days. Participants got an average of 67-percent right on the placebo day and 66-percent right on the ecstasy day. Ecstasy didn’t improve empathy wholesale.
A closer look at the results, however, showed that ecstasy did affect performance. The RMET has subscales for positive, negative or neutral expressions, so scores were parsed accordingly. After taking ecstasy, participants scored significantly better on positive expressions, getting nearly 75-percent right. For example, they were significantly more likely to correctly identify a friendly gaze. Ecstasy had no effect on neutral expressions. For negative expressions, on the contrary, participants performed worse after taking ecstasy, getting less than 60-percent correct. They mistook hostile glares for something gentler.
To understand why ecstasy might lead to altered performance on the RMET, Hysek took blood samples to measure circulating oxytocin levels. Previous studies have shown that oxytocin improves recognition of cheerful faces but slows reaction times to fearful faces, suggesting that oxytocin may help us recognize positive emotions, but not negative, more accurately. The authors found that ecstasy dosing led to higher levels of oxytocin in the bloodstream. Ecstasy may cause changes in the way we recognize emotions because it boosts oxytocin levels.
We traditionally think ecstasy affects us by altering our internal feelings. Consistently, after taking ecstasy, participants reported being more alert and excited, indicating an altered internal state. They also reported feeling more open, talkative and closer with others. The prevailing wisdom held that these drug effects accounted for all of the experience of taking ecstasy, including its usefulness as a therapeutic in treating PTSD.
This study suggests ecstasy does something more, as well. In addition to altering internal feelings, ecstasy leads us to interpret someone’s mood more positively. A drug high could be that we feel good being around happy people. Ecstasy leads to happiness directly and indirectly--directly from the boost in mood and energy levels, and indirectly because you’re more keen to positive cues people emit. When the world is smiling at you, you smile back. Although we can’t tell from this study how strong the indirect effect is, it raises a possibility for future research to tease out.
Whether or not ecstasy affected RMET performance through oxytocin, it led to better detection of positive emotions, and this may be important for its role in treating PTSD. As the authors said, the “[ecstasy]-induced shift in accuracy toward a better perception of positive emotional stimuli may facilitate the therapeutic alliance.” PTSD usually develops following a terrifying event and symptoms often include recurring thoughts of the event, along with debilitating anxiety. Psychotherapy often aims to change the patterns of thought to reduce the associated anxiety, but discussing such a threatening issue with a relative stranger can be difficult. If you are aware of the positive regard your therapist has for you, you may like him better. A likeable therapist may have an edge at helping you get better.
Answer to the above RMET example: b. fanstasizing
Image credit: http://www.mdma.net/soulmed.htm
Reference:
Hysek CM, Domes G, Liechti ME. MDMA enhances "mind reading" of positive emotions and impairs "mind reading" of negative emotions. Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2012 Jul;222(2):293-302. PubMed PMID: 22277989
