Botox injections are the most common cosmetic surgeries performed in the United States, with over 4.6 million people every year being injected with the botulinum toxin in order to paralyze facial muscles and prevent wrinkles. But botox doesn't just make people look younger (or, if done poorly, like a lion) - it might actually force its patients to stop feeling angry or sad, even if they don't want to.


The ever delightful NCBI ROFL has the scoop. Here's the paper, which comes from a 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology:


It's actually a simple enough idea - just as our emotions influence our facial expressions, our expressions can actually loop back and subtly influence our emotion. And if your face is so full of paralyzing bacteria that your mouth is stuck in a frozen smile...well, who wouldn't start feeling good eventually? At the very least, botox can repress negative emotions, as the researchers explain:



But the face isn't just too paralyzed to feel pain. It's also apparently too stiff to feel true happiness:


Still, if you're worried botox will mean an end of happiness entirely, fear not! As the researchers so reassuringly put it, botox generally means a net decrease in negative emotions, which is pretty much the medical equivalent of being deliriously happy:

