THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYsent to the facial muscles that provoke emotional feelings, or if instead
it is the feedback about the position of our facial muscles that affects
the way we feel.
To find this out, Andreas Hennenlotter at the Max Planck Institute
and his colleagues conducted an ingenious study in which they recruited
women who had just had, or were due to have, cosmetic botox injections
in their faces, thus rendering them unable to flex their frown muscles.
Hennenlotter’s team scanned the women’s brains while they imitated
angry facial expressions. All of them showed increased activity in the
amygdala – a brain structure involved in emotional processing – when
imitating an angry expression versus just looking at it. Crucially, however,
this exaggerated amygdala activity was not as great in the women who’d
had the botox. In other words, the influence of our facial expressions on
emotional processing is not only about the neural commands sent to the
muscles, feedback from the position of the facial muscles also seems to
play an important role too.
Why do we cry?
We do it a lot when we’re babies, less when we’re adult, but everybody
cries sometimes. Quite why remains something of a mystery. When
psychologists ask people about their real-life crying episodes, a
substantial majority say that they felt better after a good session. This
fits with the popular idea that crying serves a cathartic, cleansing
function. By contrast, when crying is studied under laboratory condi-
tions – for example, by showing participants a tear-jerker of a film- people usually show no benefits. If anything they feel worse. This
mismatch between survey and lab research could arise from the role
played by social context. In real life, a person who cries will often be
comforted by those around them. In this context, we can see that
crying serves an obvious social role, communicating to others that we
are in distress. When crying has been studied in the laboratory, partici-
pants have usually been on their own, so perhaps it’s no wonder they
haven’t experienced any benefit.
Researchers have also looked at whether some people benefit
from crying more than others. Although women cry more than men,
Jonathan Rottenberg’s team at the University of Southern California
found no evidence that they benefit more from crying. The most
important characteristic in this regard was “alexithymia”, which is a
difficulty understanding the source and meaning of one’s emotions.
Rottenberg’s team found that people fitting this description benefited
the least from crying. Another approach of psychologists has been to