Thursday, June 24, 2010

Smiling makes you happy research into botox shows

Smiling actually increases your happiness, research into anti-wrinkle treatment Botox suggests.

The trend for 'baby' Botox: 10 of the best practitioners Researchers have discovered that being unable to smile when you are happy feeds back to the brain reducing the intensity of feeling.
Botox, used to fight facial wrinkles, is made of an extremely toxic protein called Botulinum toxin that temporarily paralyses the muscles that cause creases.

That means no lines, but also no moving of the muscles at all which often makes faces look frozen.
Now the lack of facial expressions may influence emotional experiences as well, the research found.
A person with limited ability to make facial expressions was found to also have a limited ability to feel emotions.
"With Botox, a person can respond otherwise normally to an emotional event, [such as] 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," said researcher Joshua Davis, a psychologist at Barnard College in New York.
"It thus allows for a test of whether facial expressions and the sensory feedback from them to the brain can influence our emotions."
Mr Davis and his Barnard colleague Ann Senghas led a team of researchers who showed people emotionally charged videos both before and after they were injected with either Botox, or Restylane – a substance injected into lips or facial wrinkles that fills out sagging skin.
Restylane was used as a control because it simply adds filler but doesn't limit the movement of muscles.
Compared with the control group, the Botox participants "exhibited an overall significant decrease in the strength of emotional experience," the researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal Emotion.
The Botox group responded less strongly to mildly positive clips after they had the injections than before the Botox.
The findings tie into an idea suggested more than a century ago that feedback from facial expressions to the brain can influence the experience of emotions, the researchers said.
The simple act of smiling can help make you feel happy, while frowning can bring down your mood.

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