DRINKING BEER IMPROVES YOUR ABILITY TO IDENTIFY EMOTIONS

Many individuals claim consuming alcohol can impair our judgment. However, a recent study revealed that drinking Beer actually helps you to improve your ability to recognize certain emotions. Matthias Liechti, a professor of psychopharmacology at the University of Basel in Switzerland and co-author of the study stated that though “many people drink beer and know its effects through personal experience, there is surprisingly little scientific data on its effects on the processing of emotional social information.” Approximately 60 people in the age group of 18 to 50 in the study drank either alcoholic Beer or non-alcoholic Beer over the course of 15 minutes. Reports say that the people in the study on average drank approximately 17 ounces of Beer. The amount of Beer given to people in the study was meant to make them drunk enough to test their ability to identify emotions. Furthermore, the participants did not have a clue on whether they were drinking non-alcoholic or alcoholic Beer. Individuals in the study started experiencing the effects of Beer after thirty minutes and researchers initiated their experiments at that stage. Researchers showed faces, which represented six basic emotions (surprise, anger, happiness, disgust, sadness, and fear) to the participants, and asked them to identify the emotions represented in each face. The analysis found that individuals who drank regular alcoholic Beer were better at recognizing the faces that represented happiness, when compared to the individuals who drank non-alcoholic Beer. The findings were presented in the annual meeting of the European College of Neuro-Psychopharmacology (ECNP), which was held at Vienna, and it was later published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. “We found that drinking a glass of beer helps people see happy faces faster and enhances concern for positive emotional situations,” Liechti said. However, the study also indicated that there were no differences in how fast the individuals identified other emotions. Researchers also conducted several other experiments during the study, which indicated that the individuals who drank alcoholic Beer expressed a superior desire to spend time with other people, compared to those who drank non-alcoholic Beer. Interestingly, the study also revealed that the effects were more pronounced in women when compared to men. A professor of psychiatry and addiction at the University of Amsterdam, Wim van den Brink, commented that the consumption of same level of alcohol leads to different blood concentration in men and women, and this might be the reason for the effects in women to become more pronounced.