We all know that Botox injections limit your ability to frown, and thereby show your anger or sadness. But a new study reveals that the inability to show anger actually helps interrupt the brain's signaling system for anger. People who use Botox are slower at recognizing anger and depression -- and are less likely to experience the emotions overall.
It's a version of the classic finding in psychology that facial expressions can produce the very emotion they usually reflect. Called the facial feedback hypothesis, it implies that forcing your lips and cheeks into a smile can make you feel happy and scowling can make you feel annoyed, at least a little. Building on that research, graduate student David Havas of the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to study people who had received Botox treatments that paralyzed one pair of their corrugator muscles, which cause the forehead to constrict into a frown. The idea was to see whether the treatment affected their ability to feel certain emotions. We already know that Botox affects the ability to convey emotions such as anger, and a 2006 study found that it might even alleviate depression, as Newsweek reported, presumably by the same mechanism: block the facial expression of sadness, prevent the related emotion.
*****
This is the first study suggesting that Botox affects the ability to understand the emotional content of language. "Normally, the brain would be sending signals to the periphery to frown, and the extent of the frown would be sent back to the brain," UW-Madison professor emeritus of psychology Arthur Glenberg (and Havas's adviser) said in a statement. "But here, that loop is disrupted, and the intensity of the emotion and of our ability to understand it when embodied in language is disrupted."
Botox: it's the neurotoxin that just keeps giving.
