It’s long been known that simply smiling makes people feel better and making an angry face can make people feel more angry. Thus some cosmetic surgeons speculated:
People with Botox may be less vulnerable to the angry emotions of other people
because they themselves can’t make angry or unhappy faces as easily. And because
people with Botox can’t spread bad feelings to others via their expressions,
people without Botox may be happier too.
Amazingly, a recent experiment in the journal Cerebral Cortex supports this theory, although the abstract is a mouthful. You can read a summary here.
We show that, during imitation of angry facial expressions, reduced
feedback due to BTX treatment attenuates activation of the left
amygdala and its functional coupling with brain stem regions
implicated in autonomic manifestations of emotional states. These
findings demonstrate that facial feedback modulates neural activity
within central circuitries of emotion during intentional imitation of
facial expressions. Given that people tend to mimic the emotional
expressions of others, this could provide a potential physiological
basis for the social transfer of emotion.
Smile and the whole world smiles with you.
Or, to put it in a way which will sell fewere Botox treatments,Botox blocks emotional communication.
Will Botox be covered under Universal Health Care?
On the other hand, I worked in a large commercial tower and passed by a “skin clinic” that offered every skin-related treatment under the sun, run by a dermatologist who migrated from simply treating acne and sun damage to the more lucrative cosmetic side of things. (Which I’m sure I’ll be availing myself of someday given my lengthy and heavy exposure to the sun into my mid-20s.)
It was my experience that the “inability to produce expressions” association with Botox was overblown. Certainly it is possible to literally freeze someone’s face in place, but for the most part the (usually women, but some men) I encountered had no problem smiling, or frowning. Unlike celebrities, many Joe and Jane Average types tend to get ‘just enough’ treatment to minimize lines in certain areas, which had the effect of producing less lined skin, but leaving people perfectly able to make just about any expression they wanted – just without the degree of crease-inducing squish they had previously. It might be argued that these people were subsequently less self-conscious about beaming an obvious smile to the world.
Of course the reality (as I have experienced directly
I find this blog to be extremely funny. I have never even thought of botox to be something that could benefit someone other than the injected person. But, I guess that it is completely true. If you are unable to give someone a hateful loook than they are less likely to give you one back, therefore making both parties happier. Health insurance companies should take this into consideration, because if someone is happier they are less likely to have to go to a psychiatrist for depression, thus helping the insurance companies out.
Reducing emotional communication only improves matters if your emotions were negative in the first place.
Rather than seeing the smile of someone with botox and feeling better myself, I usually sense that something is unnatural about said smile, something haunting and depressing.
Good commentary on the worth of this research.
I’ve thought of this! Pretty obvious conclusion when you know that our facial expressions feed back on our emotions (2-way causality). I wonder if this means that phonies – people with phoney smiles that make you want to punch them -are are happier than the peoples whose facial expressions are a true indication of their emotional state? There’s at least an honours thesis in that for someone…if it hasn’t been done already.
Having visions of a youthful-looking botoxed peacenik society, singing Bob Dylan songs and dancing in circles…
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