Ok, we’ve all seen the after-school specials
and scare stories – but what if marijuana
really does rob you of your emotions?
Apparently, it does. Sort of. It’s better
to say that marijuana changes the way we process
them, lowering our ability to notice some
emotions while heightening our sensitivity
to others. A study by Lucy Troup, an assistant
professor at Colorado State University, found
that cannabis use significantly affects our
ability to implicitly recognize
– and empathize – with the emotions of others.
Here’s how the study worked: over the course
of two years, Troup and her grad students
experimented with about 70 volunteers. Each
volunteer was asked to identify her or himself
as a chronic, moderate or non-cannabis user.
They hooked the volunteers up to EEGs and
began showing them faces depicting four expressions:
neutral, happy, fearful or angry.
The EEGs monitored what happened in specific regions
of the brain
when the volunteers saw these four types of faces.
Troup first asked the pot enthusiasts and
the herbal teetotalers to explicitly identify
an emotion – “look at this face. What
do you think this person feels?” In this
regard, all three groups functioned at about
the same level. However, when asked to identify
the gender of the face, and then later were
quizzed about the emotion, Troup and her team
found some weird stuff: the cannabis users
were really, really bad at it. Like, so bad.
While they could explicitly identify emotions,
the second experiment asked them to implicitly
register the feelings of others. Cannabis
users had a smaller response to positive emotions
– the happy faces.
But here’s the plot twist: the same cannabis
users were found to be more sensitive to negative
emotions, especially anger. Are they just
used to having to be cool around authority
figures and avoid being busted? Kidding – probably
not, since all the users were legal under
Colorado’s Amendment 64.
Troup and her team aim to conduct a second
study, focusing on mood disorders like depression
or, for the paranoid smokers out there, anxiety.
It’s important research, especially considering
how marijuana’s legal status has, until
very recently, hampered attempts to conduct
meaningful studies on its effects.
Thanks for watching! I have a million questions,
but we’ll keep it to two. First, do you
think this research is worthwhile? Second
…what’s the best munchie food? Seriously,
I need to know for, uh, …research. Tell
me what you think, and remember to stay tuned
for more of the latest and strangest science
at now.howstuffworks.com.
