The use of Botox not only impairs a user’s ability to express emotion, it also impairs her ability to feel emotion and process and understand emotion in others. In other words, use of Botox can impair emotional experience and the ability to empathize. There have been two independent studies done on this recently that I’ve read about. One, at the University of Wisconsin – Madison testing new Botox users’ ability to understand anger and sadness, and another, at Barnard College in New York City, testing ability to feel emotion.

At the University of Wisconsin, researchers found that new users of Botox were significantly less able to understand emotions in others, presumably because they lack the ability to make the expressions that allow them to mimic those emotions. If a friend described how she broke her leg in a accident, for instance, Botox users might not feel as much empathy because they wouldn’t be able to properly wince and vicariously feel her pain. A study at Barnard College in New York came to a similar conclusion: that Botox users didn’t feel emotions as deeply as non-users.

Here’s a link to a description of the University of Wisconsin’s study, which focuses more on empathy. [thanks to Eyes for Lies]

And here’s more on the study at Barnard College, which is about participants’ ability to feel emotion, an essential component of empathy:

Scientists think that facial expressions themselves may influence emotional experiences, so a person with a limited ability to make facial expressions may 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.”

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 June issue of the journal Emotion. In particular, 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, for example, can help make you feel happy, while frowning can bring down your mood.

“In a bigger picture sense, the work fits with common beliefs, such as ‘fake it till you make it,'” Davis said.

[From MSNBC]

I’ve mentioned before that I’m considering Botox now that I’m looking at the other side of 35, but this news makes me wonder if it’s worth it. I would love to see follow up studies looking at what kind of implications long term Botox use has on emotional experience. Can it make you depressed or less caring, for instance? Does that in turn have positive clinical applications, for instance in people who are depressed or grieving? More than that, is Botox turning an entire generation of well off women into cold ass bitches with blunted personalities? Can this explain Nicole Kidman’s personality and Renee Zellweger’s bitchface?