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."

Some widely prescribed drugs for depression provide relief in extreme cases but are no more effective than placebo pills for most patients, according to a new analysis released Tuesday. The findings could help settle a longstanding debate about antidepressants. While the study does not imply that the drugs are worthless for anyone with moderate to serious depression -- many such people do seem to benefit -- it does provide one likely explanation for the sharp disagreement among experts about the drugs' overall effectiveness.

Taken together, previous studies have painted a confusing picture. On one hand, industry-supported trials have generally found that the drugs sharply reduce symptoms. On the other, many studies that were not initially published, or were buried, showed no significant benefits compared with placebos.

The new report, appearing in The Journal of the American Medical Association, reviews data from previous trials on two types of drugs and finds that their effectiveness varies according to the severity of the depression being treated. Previous analyses had found a similar pattern. But the new study is the first to analyze responses from hundreds of people being treated for more moderate symptoms, as are most people who seek care.

"I think the study could dampen enthusiasm for antidepressant medications a bit, and that may be a good thing," said Dr. Erick H. Turner, a psychiatrist at Oregon Health and Science University. "People's expectations for the drugs won't be so high, and doctors won't be surprised if they’re not curing every patient they see with medications."

They split the participants into two types of diet - those who ate a diet largely based on whole foods, which includes lots of fruit, vegetables and fish, and those who ate a mainly processed food diet, such as sweetened desserts, fried food, processed meat, refined grains and high-fat dairy products.

After accounting for factors such as gender, age, education, physical activity, smoking habits and chronic diseases, they found a significant difference in future depression risk with the different diets.

Those who ate the most whole foods had a 26% lower risk of future depression than those who at the least whole foods.

By contrast people with a diet high in processed food had a 58% higher risk of depression than those who ate very few processed foods.

The three-year, $400,000 study by West Virginia University researchers is published in the September issue of the journal Spine. The National Institutes of Health sponsored study showed yoga participants displayed lifted mood, less pain and improved function in the group that compared with a control group who received standard medical therapy.

"The yoga group had less pain, less functional disability and less depression compared with the control group," said Kimberly Williams, Ph.D., research assistant professor in the Department of Community Medicine. "These were statistically significant and clinically important changes that were maintained six months after the intervention."

*****

"Proponents of yoga have long described its benefits in reducing back pain," Williams said. "But not everybody was convinced. This is a much bigger, much more rigorous evaluation than had been done before." The classes were taught by certified Iyengar yoga instructors. A popular form of yoga in the United States, Iyengar yoga emphasizes postures that encourage strength, flexibility and balance.

The problem is that many of the people one would think of as "unemployed" are not included in this unemployment rate. For one, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not count unemployed people who have been discouraged by the labor market and have given up looking for work. You are counted as a "discouraged worker" if you are available to work, want to work, and tried to look for work in the past year but gave up within four weeks for reasons including the belief that no work is available. The fact that the national unemployment rate excludes these discouraged workers has led many observers to believe it does not reflect the "real" level of unemployment. "Ask the average person if he or she is unemployed, and there is little hesitation in giving you an answer, but that may not agree with government definitions," says John Williams, an economist who examines government statistics at shadowstats.com.

*****

So if you care not just about people who meet the official definition of "unemployed" but also about people who are dropping out of the labor force, 2009 seems to be trailing 1982 in terms of the health of the labor market. Williams says that when he takes into consideration people who haven't looked for work in more than a year because they can't find jobs, the real unemployment rate today goes all the way up to 20.6 percent by his calculations. "It won't take much to get it to the worst since the Great Depression," he says.

Among users of antidepressants, the percentage receiving psychotherapy fell from 31.5% to less than 20%, the study says. About 80% of patients were treated by doctors other than psychiatrists.

Patients today may be more likely to ask about antidepressant advertising, says study author Mark Olfson of Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. During the study, spending on direct-to-consumer antidepressant ads increased from $32 million to $122 million.

Doctors today also are more comfortable prescribing antidepressants, partly because the newer drugs are safer and cause fewer serious side effects, says James Potash of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, who wasn't involved in the study.

But officials emphasized that fear should not stop patients from taking the smoking-cessation medicines, Chantix, made by Pfizer, and Zyban, made by GlaxoSmithKline, which also sells it under the brand name Wellbutrin, for depression. "Stopping smoking is a goal we should all be working towards," said Dr. Curtis J. Rosebraugh, director of a drug evaluation office at the Food and Drug Administration. "We don’t want to scare people off from trying a medication that could help them achieve this goal. You should just be careful." Pfizer will add a so-called black box warning — the F.D.A.'s most serious caution — to the packaging information for Chantix.

*****

Both companies will also be required to conduct clinical trials to assess the mental health risks associated with the drugs' uses. Pfizer is already enrolling schizophrenia patients in a trial. Because smokers and people trying to quit are statistically more likely to be depressed and suicidal, officials for both companies said it was difficult to identify the specific impact of the drugs on those risks. "Nicotine withdrawal itself can be very difficult for people to endure," Dr. Steve Romano, a Pfizer vice president, said Wednesday.

When the Princess ceased her official duties abruptly in 2003, the Imperial Household Agency (IHA) first announced that she was suffering from shingles. When The Times reported that she was also being treated for depression, the IHA denounced the article as indecent - only to confirm two months later that she was suffering from an "adjustment disorder".

The public reaction was one of sympathy for the Princess, who gave up a career as a diplomat to marry Prince Naruhito in 1993. She struggled to conceive a child and, after undergoing fertility treatment, suffered a miscarriage. The couple's only child, Princess Aiko, was born in 2001 but, as a girl, is ineligible to ascend to the throne. The birth of a boy to the Crown Prince's younger brother in 2006 solved the succession problem for the time being and eased some of the pressure on Masako. She still carries out very few official duties on the grounds that doctors have advised against it. However, in the past year especially, she has made numerous outings from the Crown Prince's official residence, the Akasaka Detached Palace.

She has been photographed dining at expensive Chinese, Mexican and French restaurants and attending events at her daughter's school. More and more openly, the usually restrained Japanese media are speculating that the problem is not so much depression as a straightforward dislike for onerous public duties.

Next week, for example, Naruhito and Masako - both British-educated - will give a private dinner party for the Prince of Wales and the Duchess. But next month, when King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain are on a six-day visit, Masako will not make an appearance. "What logical explanation can we give for that?" a palace insider asks. "That the British are healthy but the Spanish make her ill?"

If you're sad and shopping, watch your wallet: A new study shows people's spending judgment goes out the window when they’re down, especially if they're a bit self-absorbed. Study participants who watched a sadness-inducing video clip offered to pay nearly four times as much money to buy a water bottle than a group that watched an emotionally neutral clip.

*****

"This is a phenomenon that occurs without awareness," Jennifer Lerner, a Harvard professor who studies emotion and decision making, said in a phone interview. "This is really different from the idea of retail therapy, where people are feeling negative and want to cheer themselves up by shopping. People have no idea this is going on."

The researchers concluded sadness can trigger a chain of emotions leading to extravagant tendencies. Sadness leads people to become more focused on themselves, causing the person to feel that they and their possessions are worth little. That feeling increases willingness to pay more -- presumably to feel better about themselves. "Because the study used real commodities and real money, results hold implications for everyday decisions," according to the authors of the study, to be published in the journal Psychological Science, and presented Saturday at a meeting of the Society for Social and Personality Psychology.

Edward Charlesworth, a Houston-based clinical psychologist who was not involved in the study, suggested the misery-is-not-miserly phenomenon is rooted in a culture that encourages people to buy to feel better. "Certainly, the advertising industry knows that," Charlesworth, citing as an example a 1970s McDonald's fast-food jingle, 'You deserve a break today.'"

A small-scale pilot trial, published in the May 15 journal Dermatologic Surgery, found that Botox injected into frown lines around the mouth or in forehead furrows of 10 women eliminated depression symptoms in nine of them and reduced symptoms in the 10th.

*****

The study results fit with a large body of psychological research that has long shown that the mere act of smiling — even the most insincere "I don't want to pose for this photograph" smile — makes people feel better. Frowns make them feel worse. Volunteers asked to smile, for example, whether they wanted to or not, while watching a cartoon found it funnier than those not asked to smile, according to a 1989 study in the Annual Review of Psychology. Frown muscle activity, on the other hand, has been found to be a predictor of depression treatment outcome, according to a 1981 study in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

The finding fits too with certain treatment theories. Alcoholics Anonymous has a slogan, "Fake it till you make it," implying that acting as if you feel good actually helps you feel better. And cognitive therapy for depression often involves teaching people to cut the hangdog look. Botox's potential to treat depression dawned on Dr. Eric Finzi, a cosmetic surgeon in Chevy Chase, Md., and lead author of the study, a few years ago, while he was studying facial expressions. Also a painter, he was working on a series of portraits based on late 19th century photographs of patients confined in the French hospital La Salpêtrière, an institution for women "of abnormal constitution." "I went back and read Charles Darwin. Back in the 1870s, he brought up that you sort of are the emotions you express on your face," Finzi says.

Maybe, he thought, the facial muscles feed information to the emotion centers of the brain, which in turn respond with chemicals that produce happy or sad feelings. The loop is complete when those feelings are sent back to the brain, reinforcing expressions on the face. It's one theory that some researchers have held, though as yet there is no proof of such a neurological underpinning. Scientists have proven, however, that facial expressions can alter heart rate, skin temperature and blood volume.