Botox Paralyzes Emotions? Face It, Says Study
(CBS) Hollywood celebrities, look out. A new study says Botox injections may paralyze your emotions, not just your ability to show them.
"With Botox, a person can respond otherwise normally to an emotional event, e.g., a sad movie scene, but will have less movement in the facial muscles that have been injected, and therefore less feedback to the brain about such facial expressivity," Joshua Davis, the study's co-author and a Barnard psychology professor, told Health Daily.
In essence, if your face can't express it, your brain may feel the emotion with less intensity.
To sort this out, Barnard researchers showed people emotionally charged videos before and after they were injected with Botox.
Compared with a control group that received a different injection, the Botox crowd "exhibited an overall significant decrease in the strength of emotional experience," Davis and co-author Ann Senghas wrote in the June issue of the journal Emotion. The effect was strongest, they said, when participants watched mildly positive clips.
That's bad news for comedians, but may be just fine for soap opera stars.