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Cosmeticians have used Botox to remove unwanted wrinkles, banish neckbands and clear away irksome crow’s-feet. However, the drug does all this by paralysing facial muscles and, therefore, inhibiting facial expressions.

Have you ever smiled despite not wanting to, and later found that smiling actually cheered you up? Or have you ever frowned at ugly incidents, albeit whole unrelated to you and found that this made you feel angrier? Researches have proved that you do, at least physiologically.

Scientists have studied the human face and its expressions for hundreds of years and believe that it has evolved as a tool for better communication and understanding. Some believe that mimicking others can help understand what feelings they are going through, and take us into the same emotional state. While others postulate that facial feedback by itself can create the whole emotion. The muscles of the face start contracting unintentionally if someone wearing a big grin comes in the view because we respond to people not only by recognising their face but also by making the same face.

Facial movement and visceral bodily feedback can have a deep impact on our emotional experiences. For instance, an individual who is forced to smile will actually feel happy. Charles Darwin, obsessed with faces, was among the first to notice this phenomenon and suggested this through his ‘facial feedback hypothesis’. However, Darwin didn’t have an idea about Botox, which was a much later development.

After Darwin, William James proposed that the ‘awareness of bodily changes activated by a stimulus is the emotion.’ That is to say, if bodily changes are absent, it’s not an emotion but only an intellectual thought. These theories were relatively untested until 1980’s when neuroscientists and psychologists started studying non-verbal communication and heated debates among researchers began to take place.

Nowadays, the conversation between the brain and the face is being studied with a lot of tools Darwin didn’t have in his time like, MRI scanners, beautifying drugs and procedures such as Botox and subcutaneous electrodes, etc.
Some of the recent studies have raised the bizarre possibility that our love affair with the crease-eliminating and face-freezing drug — Botox — may be altering the emotions of billions of people.

Cosmeticians have used Botox to remove unwanted wrinkles, banish neckbands and clear away irksome crow’s-feet. However, the drug does all this by paralysing facial muscles and, therefore, inhibiting facial expressions.

Scientists have conducted a study to find out whether the feeling of happiness or anger causes an activity in the brain which then causes facial muscles to smile or frown, or is it the actual motion of the muscles that send the feedback to the brain and causes emotions. If the only thing that matters is the brain’s commands like ‘frown’ or ‘smile’ then immobilising muscles using Botox shouldn’t be of any consequence.

Experiments led by the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany, were conducted on women who had received Botox injections on their face for cosmetic reasons and those without a Botox treatment. These women were given  images of angry faces and were asked to observe or mimic the expressions.

The neuroscientists took their brain scans and as expected, the brains of the women without Botox had a largely increased activity in the Amygdala — a key brain region for processing emotions. In contrast, women using Botox showed a much lower level of activity in the Amygdala after imitating the angry expressions.

These findings demonstrate that the facial feedback to the brain was absent for the Botox-injected women, and also that facial feedback does modulate neural activity within the circuitries of emotions.

However, when these women imitated sad faces, there was no difference in Amygdala activation. That is, the Botox shots didn’t immobilise the muscles which make our face look sad. So, is there a possibility that immobilising the muscles that make us smile will take away the ability to express happiness using the muscle movement?

Scientists are conducting more researches which will probably answer the remaining questions. But it makes sense from these evidences that drugs like Botox will irrevocably alter the emotional exchanges and tamper the lines of communication between face and the brain.

In the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, a team of cosmetic surgeons expressed satisfaction over these experiments since they believe that people who use Botox are less vulnerable to other people’s anger because they can’t imitate them easily. Similarly, they cannot express anger themselves and so, will not be able to spread anger.

Personal appearance can be of great importance to some people and they go to great lengths to maintain a youthful look. Perhaps plastic surgeons and the people who are willing to get Botox injected only focus on youthfulness. But neuroscience raises a darker possibility. Unnaturally altering emotions will change our mind in ways we cannot predict and these procedures may have many effects that are more than just skin deep.

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