Hormonal contraceptives can influence emotions and memory, study shows

Hormonal contraceptives appear to shape how women experience emotions in the moment and how they remember emotional events later, new research has found.

In the study, researchers compared women using hormonal contraceptives with women who were naturally cycling.

Participants viewed positive, negative and neutral images while applying different emotion regulation strategies, such as distancing, reinterpretation or immersion, and later completed a memory test.

Women on hormonal contraceptives showed stronger emotional reactions compared to naturally cycling women.

When they used strategies like distancing or reinterpretation, they remembered fewer details of negative events, though their general memory remained intact.

In other words, they could recall the overall event but not all of the specifics.

That gap may actually be helpful, allowing women to move on instead of replaying unpleasant details.

Strategies like immersion boosted memory for positive images in both groups, making happy moments stick more clearly.

The findings add weight to a question many women have had but few studies have answered: How does birth control affect not just the body but the mind?

Emotion regulation and memory are tied to mental health outcomes such as depression, and this research suggests hormonal contraceptives may influence those processes in subtle but meaningful ways.

Beatriz Brandao is a graduate student in Rice’s Department of Psychological Sciences and lead author of the study.

The researcher said: “For women, the findings highlight what many have long suspected: Birth control can affect more than reproductive health.

“Hormonal birth control does more than prevent pregnancy — it also influences brain areas involved in emotions and memory, which are central to mental health.”

Stephanie Leal is adjunct assistant professor of psychological sciences at Rice, assistant professor at UCLA and senior author of the study

She added: “These findings are very exciting.

“They suggest that hormonal birth control has the ability to modulate both how women can regulate their emotions as well as how that regulation may influence memory, especially toward negative experiences.”

Brandao and her collaborators plan to expand the work by studying naturally cycling women across different menstrual phases and by comparing types of hormonal contraceptives, such as pills versus IUDs.