Botox the Frown, Smooth Out Bad Feelings?

Getting the frown lines in your forehead neutralized by Botox may do more than change your appearance, it may change your emotional response to language. That's according to a new study, presented to the Society for Personal and Social Psychology in Las Vegas, and which will be published in the journal Psychological Science.

To test how blocking a frown might affect emotional comprehension of language, researchers had 40 subjects treated with botulium toxin or Botox, to paralyze a pair of "corrugator" muscles, which cause brow-wrinkling frows. Before they had recieved the powerful nerve poison and then again two weeks after the Botox treaments, subjects were asked to read written statements. The statements were angry ("The pushy telemarketer won't let you return to your dinner"); sad ("You open your email in-box on your birthday to find no new emails"); or happy ("The water park is refreshing on the hot summer day.")

The subject's comprehension was gauged by how quickly they read the sentence (they pressed a button to indicate when they had finished reading it). "We periodically checked that the readers were understanding the sentences, not just pressing the button," says David Havas, the lead author and a University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology Ph.D. candidate. While there was no difference between pre and post-Botox time needed to understand the happy sentences, after the injections, subjects took more time to read the angry and sad sentences. Although the time difference was small, it was significant, he adds. Moreover, the changes in reading time couldn't be attributed to changes in participants' mood.

"There is a long-standing idea in psychology, called the facial feedback hypothesis," says Havas. "Essentially, it says, when you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you. It's an old song, but it's right. Actually, this study suggests the opposite: When you're not frowning, the world seems less angry and less sad."

The interactions of facial expression, thoughts and emotions has intrigued scientists for more than a century. The Havas study broke new ground by linking the expression of emotion to the ability to understand language, says Havas's advisor, UW-Madison professor emeritus of psychology Arthur Glenberg. "Normally, the brain would be sending signals to the periphery to frown, and the extent of the frown would be sent back to the brain. But here, that loop is disrupted, and the intensity of the emotion, and of our ability to understand it when embodied in language, is disrupted."

Practically, the study "may have profound implications for the cosmetic-surgery," says Glenberg. "Even though it's a small effect, in conversation, people respond to fast, subtle cues about each other's understanding, intention and empathy. If you are slightly slower reacting as I tell you about something made me really angry, that could signal to me that you did not pick up my message."

Such an effect could snowball, Havas says, but the outcome could also be positive: "Maybe if I am not picking up sad, angry cues in the environment, that will make me happier."

In theoretical terms, the finding supports a psychological hypothesis called "embodied cognition," says Glenberg, now a professor of psychology at Arizona State University. "The idea of embodied cognition is that all our cognitive processes, even those that have been thought of as very abstract, are actually rooted in basic bodily processes of perception, action and emotion."

With some roots in evolutionary theory, the embodied cognition hypothesis suggests that our thought processes, like our emotions, are refined through evolution to support survival and reproduction.

Embodied cognition links two seemingly separate mental functions, Glenberg says. "It's been speculated at least since Darwin that the peripheral expression of emotion is a part of the emotion. An important role of emotion is social: it communicates, ‘I love' or ‘I hate you,' and it makes sense that there would be this very tight connection between peripheral expression and brain mechanism."

"Language has traditionally been seen as a very high level, abstract process that is divorced from more primitive processes like action, perception and emotion," Havas says. "This study shows that far from being divorced from emotion, language understanding can be hindered when those peripheral bodily mechanism are interrupted."