EMOTIONS IN THE AGE OF BOTOX

Botulin injections in the facial muscles, which relax expression lines and make one's skin appear younger as a result of a mild paralysis, have another, not easily predictable effect: they undermine the ability to understand the facial expressions of other people. This consequence, as scientists explain in a new research study, depends on a temporary block of proprioceptive feedback, a process that helps us understand other people's emotions by reproducing them on our own bodies.

By now we are all used to seeing its more or less successful results on Italian and international celebrities, but in fact the market of Botox-based procedures involves a large number of individuals. Just to give an idea, about 250,000 procedures were done in Italy in 2014. It is therefore natural to wonder about the possible side effects of this practice. One fairly unpredictable consequence concerns the emotional domain, and in particular the perception of emotional information and facial expressions. "The thankfully temporary paralysis of facial muscles that this toxin causes impairs our ability to capture the meaning of other people's facial expressions," explains Jenny Baumeister, research scientist at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste.

Baumeister's intuition stems from a very well-known scientific theory, called embodiment. The idea is that the processing of emotional information, such as facial expressions, in part involves reproducing the same emotions on our own bodies. In other words, when we observe a smile, our face too tends to smile as we try to make sense of that expression. However, if our facial muscles are paralyzed by Botox, then the process of understanding someone else's emotion expression may turn out to be more difficult.

Thanks to: sciencedaily.com