Researchers have known for a year or so that when people have botox injected into their facial muscles, besides reducing wrinkles, they feel emotions less strongly.
More recently, researchers at USC discovered that people who have botox injections also have a difficult time perceiving the emotions other people are having. Essentially, when we see someone having an emotion, we reflect it in our own bodies with mirror neurons and also with actually mimicking their facial movements... I am remembering back to my research on Neuro Linguistic Programming which says that if you want to build rapport with someone watch them and match what they're doing...
All of this bodes very well for the field of Somatics, where one of the central theories is that the emotional body is the physical body is the spirit, is just one; Soma. What this says is that the emotion is the movement and if movement is decreased, as with sensory motor amnesia and any type of holding/rigidity, emotional capacity is decreased as well. Or more accurately, the nervous system feels a movement happening in the face or throughout the body and we then label that movement angry, sad, confused, disgusted. If no movement happens, then there's nothing to label.
One thing to consider: does this allude to "the dark vise" or "senile posture" as an indicator of depression, flat affect? The "Dark Vise" is a posture that Thomas Hanna describes as one of habituated tension in multiple motor patterns. The reflexive withdrawal response, tightening the flexor muscles of the anterior body, collides with the reflexive excitatory response, tightening the extensor muscles of the posterior body, and you get a situation where a person's whole body is held rigidly by their musculature. The person experiences movement/life as very effortful and movement/life/emotion becomes very limited. If one is to extrapolate from these recent findings, the "Dark Vise" is most assuredly a posture of depression and diminished emotional experience. Probably much more dramatically diminished given that a person's whole body, not just their face, is 'frozen'.
And if that's true then could Somatic Education be an actual solution to depression? Meaning if someone had free control over their physiology and particularly over the expressive muscles of the face, would they start to naturally have free flowing emotional experiences like the rest of us? I have had the opportunity to work with a few people with clinical depression and have witnessed intense emotional releases with this work but can not speak yet to this being a cure all. I have limited ability to assess such changes given that I am not able to diagnose depression or any other emotional state psychology holds realm over.
The scarier side of what these studies proport is that people are voluntarily diminishing their ability to feel emotion and, perhaps more importantly, understand and empathize with other people. Our ability to empathize seems critical to our success as social organisms. Not because we need to "feel" what others are feeling but that there is so much communication going on non verbally helping us to understand and live with each other. Just as rigidity/sensory motor amnesia(sma) inhibits free flowing communication in the body and creates dysfunction, we can and should expect that a society not communicate freely through non verbal cues will suffer for it.
If you go by certain diagnostic measures, it appears that we are essentially injecting psychopathy into our bodies. Psychopathy is marked by an inability to empathize making it easier for a person to harm someone else. It is also marked by actually harming someone else...
I'm not saying that botox will lead to people killing each other, but a person who can not observe another person and judge whether their having a good or bad day is likely to struggle making friends, keeping a job and otherwise navigating the multitude of social situations they face on a regular basis. Most importantly a person who looks around and is numb to the experiences of others is going to miss out on the complexity of experiences and emotions that happen right before their eyes day in and day out.
But then again, is this part of the draw to botox? A way of escaping from the complexities of life. A person choosing smooth over natural is at the root of the denying, if just a little bit, realities grip on their experience. And is there an appeal for some to mute the colors of their emotional world? Does botox make someone feel less worry, less anxiety too? Certainly there is to be expected a feeling of relief looking in the mirror and not seeing the signs of your years on this earth but perhaps the relief comes to from the muscular numbing. As worry lines fade, how about the worried feelings that come with them? As they inject it into shoulder muscle to cause temporary relaxing again is there an easy of the stressed out feeling accompanying elevated shoulders? An intriguing prospect indeed.
For me, easing the downs does not outweigh lowering the highs or broadening the mids... I'll happily watch my cheeks wrinkle with smile lines and my forehead crease with worry as my life continues with the good the bad, and the not so pretty moments.
