Smiling makes you happy research into botox shows

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."

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