These gestures are unconscious, and when our facial muscles imitate another person’s smile or frown, signals are sent to our brain that allow us to interpret those emotions in our cultural reference.
But this not only helps us to identify the emotions of the other but to experience them ourselves.
What the study found about people’s ability to understand the expression of emotions may change due to the disruption of botox-induced muscle feedback.
The study group consisted of 10 women between 33 and 40 years of age.
They all received botox injections to induce temporary paralysis in the muscle responsible for frowning and then measured their brain activity while looking at pictures of emotional faces.
The researchers found that activity in the amygdala, the center of our brain responsible for emotional processing, showed signs of change when seeing happy and angry faces after botox injections.
So preventing the frown with botox injections inhibits the way the brain processes emotional faces, according to the research.