A new study has found chronic cannabis users sometimes have trouble identifying, analyzing, and empathizing with emotions like joy, despair, and anger.
Published in the journal PLOS ONE, the study also found their observed effect could be counteracted based on if the emotions are clearly or implicitly seen.
Continuing the controversy
The use of cannabis is a controversial topic and so study author Lucy Troup, assistant professor of psychology at Colorado State University, said her team tried to approach cannabis use from an unbiased position.
“We’re not taking a pro or anti stance; but we just want to know, what does it do? It’s really about making sense of it,” Troup said in a press release.
In the study, researchers used an electroencephalogram (EEG) to evaluate the brain activities of approximately 70 participants. They all self-identified as long-term, moderate, or non-users of marijuana. The recruits were all checked out as legal users of cannabis under Colorado Amendment 64; meaning they were either medical marijuana users over 18 or recreational users 21 or older.
After being linked to an EEG, volunteers were asked to look at faces showing four different expressions: neutral, happy, fearful, and angry. Marijuana users exhibited a greater response to faces showing a negative expression, especially anger, than control subjects. On the other hand, marijuana users exhibited a smaller reaction to positive expression than the control subjects.
In another part of the experiment, the volunteers were asked to observe the emotion, and then explicitly identify the emotion. In those instances, users and non-users of marijuana were virtually the same.
However, when volunteers were asked to concentrate on the sex of the face, and later describe the emotion, marijuana users scored much lower than non-users. The researchers said this signified a depressed capacity to “implicitly” recognize emotions. Marijuana users were also less able to sympathize with the emotions.
The study appeared to indicate the brain’s capacity to assess emotion is affected by marijuana, but there may be some compensation that reverses that effect. There’s no distinction between users and non-users when they’re directed at a particular emotion, the study found. But on a deeper degree of emotion assessment, shown by the capacity to empathize, the response is decreased in marijuana users.
“We tried to see if our simple emotion-processing paradigm could be applied to people who use cannabis, because we wanted to see if there was a difference,” Troup said. “That’s how it all started.”
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