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Botox makes us happy
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.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on October 28, 2008 at 07:02 AM in Medicine, Science | Permalink
Comments
Smile and the whole world smiles with you.
Posted by: at Oct 28, 2008 7:13:47 AM
Clearly "we" are not producing enough botoxed people, so clearly there is a case for public subsidies of botox work financed out of general taxation. You know something else? When I do NOT give the finger to a guy that cuts me off, that tends to make the rest of the world a little happier too! I'd gladly take a subsidy to refrain from that activity.
Posted by: wintercow20 at Oct 28, 2008 7:35:20 AM
Or, to put it in a way which will sell fewere Botox treatments,Botox blocks emotional communication.
Posted by: Diversity at Oct 28, 2008 7:41:56 AM
So Botox creates positive externalities. It should be subsidized.
Posted by: o at Oct 28, 2008 8:27:35 AM
Will Botox be covered under Universal Health Care?
Posted by: Jay at Oct 28, 2008 11:26:20 AM
Is Joan Rivers the happiest person ever then?
Posted by: Julian at Oct 28, 2008 12:15:28 PM
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
Posted by: MM at Oct 28, 2008 1:45:41 PM
By the way, lip augmentation was another procedure performed there, and while I saw some women who were clearly augmented, I never saw one of the fish-lipped freaks I see on television or in movies. One would think that given the money and access available to celebrities they would be able to receive the best treatment and advice on results to shoot for, yet they frequently come out into the public with the most hideous results imaginable while a 25-year-old woman can walk out of an unknown clinic in an average city having paid likely far less money for a vastly superior and truly attractive result.
Posted by: MM at Oct 28, 2008 1:49:24 PM
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.
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Posted by: linda at Oct 28, 2008 11:19:42 PM
Reducing emotional communication only improves matters if your emotions were negative in the first place.
Posted by: doctorpat at Oct 29, 2008 12:34:44 AM
This blog is hilarious! Everyone in the world must need Botox so we can all look the same and make the same expression. Therefore everyone in the world will be happy. Although it is hilarious I believe that this would be ridiculous. But it is pretty cool that people with Botox make others happy because there lack of facial movement.
Posted by: JH at Oct 29, 2008 11:02:01 AM
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.
Posted by: meter at Oct 29, 2008 11:25:31 AM
In this blog there is speculation on whether or not people with Botox can be less vulnerable to angry or sad feelings because Botox makes it harder for them to make the faces correlating with these feelings. To my surprise a recent experiment supports this speculation saying that people tend to mimic other peoples emotional expressions and so basically people who have had Botox can also not spread bad emotional feelings to others since they cannot make the facial expressions that go along with those feelings. Therefore, they are saying that people who have had Botox may ultimately be happier than those who have not had Botox. I think it’s a very interesting speculation that I hadn’t considered before but it does seem to makes sense. I think a lot of people do mimic other people’s emotional expressions without even realizing it so I can see where this would be supported.
Posted by: JLV at Oct 29, 2008 2:16:51 PM
Good commentary on the worth of this research.
Posted by: agm at Oct 29, 2008 7:37:49 PM
Wow this blog is so funny! I find it amazing that in todays society we have to have chemicals pumped into our face just to give the appearance that we are happy. Back in our grandparents time people did not have to have botox to smile. People smiled when they were happy thus causing other people to be happy. Has America become so cold hearted that we need botox just to make ourselves and others happy?
Posted by: Dakota Burdette at Oct 29, 2008 10:28:59 PM
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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