Interesting Botox Side Effects: Decreased Perception

Just in case injecting botulism toxin into your face somehow sounds like a good idea, one of the more interesting botox side effects has just come to light:  a decreased sense of perception when it comes to reading other peoples’ emotional states.

This is especially interesting, because it’s a little counter-intuitive.  Sure, one might expect that other people might have trouble reading YOUR emotions, once you’ve killed off everything that moves your facial muscles move.  But why would YOU suffer the same side effect from botox?

Botox Side Effects

While it’s true that Botox works by paralyzing facial muscles in the hopes of decreasing the onset of wrinkles, it turns out it can alter our ability to essentially mirror the facial expressions of others as well.  This really just makes sense; the muscles that create the facial expressions are all dead to the world, so how could we mimic what we see on other peoples’ faces?

This is important to our perception, because a part of how we tell what other people are feeling is to (at least partly) mimic their facial expressions.  The physical act of creating the same expression allows us to emphathize with the other individual.

How do we know this?  Well, the researchers that examined the deadened perception botox side effects also used a nifty gel that actually increases the action of the facial muscles… sort of a reverse Botox.  They found that the reverse-Botox people were even more perceptive to other peoples’ emotions than controls.  Their results were published in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science.

I find this interesting on a number of levels.  First, that mimicing facial expressions is such an important part of our emotional response to others… that feeling what others feel starts as imitating their physical response to their emotions.  Second, that anyone would be so crazy as to inject a toxic substance into their face, on purpose.

Just another example as to how we shouldn’t mess around too much with how the human body works.

Stay healthy!