Can Avoiding a Facial Expression Change How You Think?

An exploration of the embodied cognition research on facial feedback and detailed analytical thinking.

What the Botox Research Says About the Link Between Squinting and Focused Thought

*Lacefield Lab*

THE QUESTION

Here's an idea worth taking seriously: when people squint, they're not just protecting their eyes from light. Squinting narrows the field of vision and tends to show up when someone is doing close, careful, detail-focused work — reading fine print, threading a needle, solving a hard problem. Widening the eyes, by contrast, tends to go along with taking in the whole scene — the big picture, the context, the wide view.

So here's the hypothesis: what if someone made a habit of never squinting — deliberately, consistently, over a long time? Would that eventually make it harder for them to drop into focused, detail-oriented thinking? Would they feel less comfortable doing precise, narrow analytical work, simply because they'd stopped using one of the physical postures the brain normally pairs with that kind of thinking?

This isn't as strange a question as it might sound. There's a real, well-studied field of neuroscience that deals with exactly this kind of thing — it's called **embodied cognition**, and the short version is: your body isn't just a puppet that your brain moves around. Your physical posture and expressions feed information *back* to your brain, and that feedback actually shapes how you think and feel. It's a two-way street, not a one-way broadcast.

The clearest evidence for this two-way street doesn't come from squinting studies directly — it comes from a surprising source: Botox.

PART ONE: WHY BOTOX IS A GOOD TEST CASE

Botox is best known as a cosmetic treatment, but for researchers, it's something else entirely: a way to temporarily and safely "turn off" a specific facial muscle in real people, and then measure what happens to their thinking and feeling when that muscle can no longer move.

The muscle researchers care about most for this purpose is called the **corrugator supercilii** — the small muscle between your eyebrows that pulls them down and together. It's the muscle behind both frowning *and* squinting. When you concentrate hard on something, or when you're upset, this muscle tends to activate. Studies using sensors that detect muscle activity (called EMG) confirm this happens even during purely mental tasks with no emotion involved at all — just careful, effortful thinking. So this muscle isn't only about mood. It's tied to mental effort in general.

Since Botox blocks this exact muscle, researchers realized they could use it to answer a real scientific question: if you can't move this muscle at all, does that change how your brain processes the things that muscle is normally involved in?

PART TWO: WHAT THE RESEARCH FOUND

**Reading and understanding emotional language got measurably slower.**

In a well-known 2010 study published in the journal *Psychological Science*, researchers gave Botox to a group of people and had them read sentences — some emotionally neutral, some describing situations that would normally make a person frown (sad or upsetting scenarios). The people whose frown muscle was paralyzed took measurably longer to read and process the emotionally negative sentences specifically. Sentences with no emotional charge weren't affected at all.

In plain terms: blocking the muscle didn't make people "dumber" or slower at everything. It slowed down exactly the kind of processing that muscle would normally be involved in, and left everything else untouched. That's an important detail — it points to a specific, targeted effect rather than a general one.

**Brain scans showed the same targeted pattern.**

A separate study used real-time brain imaging (fMRI) to watch what happened inside the brain, not just how fast people read. Researchers measured activity in the amygdala — the part of the brain heavily involved in emotional reactions — while people looked at photos of angry faces. When the frown muscle was paralyzed by Botox, amygdala activity in response to those angry faces dropped. Once the Botox wore off weeks later, brain activity went right back to normal.

This is a genuinely important finding for one specific reason: it shows the effect isn't permanent. The researchers tested people *before* the Botox, *during* it, and *after* it wore off, using each person as their own comparison point. The dip in brain activity tracked the presence of the muscle block in real time — it wasn't a lasting change to how the brain is wired. It was a temporary dampening that came and went with the muscle's availability.

Worth noting too: even with the muscle completely blocked, people could still correctly identify an angry face as angry. Their judgment wasn't broken. What changed was the intensity of the underlying response — a difference between *not being able to tell* something and simply *feeling it less strongly* while doing so.

PART THREE: CAN THE CONNECTION BE RETRAINED?

This is the part with the most direct bearing on the original question — because if a blocked or unused muscle-brain connection can be deliberately restored through practice, that would suggest the same might be true for someone who has simply stopped using a particular expression by habit, without any drug involved.

There's a study on this, and it's a strong one. Researchers worked with patients who have schizophrenia — a condition often associated with reduced facial expressiveness and, correspondingly, difficulty reading other people's facial expressions. The researchers had one group of patients do structured facial exercises — deliberately, repeatedly moving the muscles around the eyes and mouth, three times a week for five weeks. A comparison group did not.

The group that did the facial exercises got measurably better at recognizing emotions in other people's faces afterward — especially fear, which had been their weakest area to begin with.

This matters a great deal for the original question. It suggests that when a muscle-based feedback channel has gone underused, it's not necessarily a one-way, permanent decline. With deliberate, repeated, purposeful practice, the connection between the physical motion and the associated mental skill can be measurably rebuilt.

PART FOUR: PUTTING IT TOGETHER

None of the studies above tested squinting specifically, or looked at people who deliberately avoided it as a long-term personal habit. That specific question hasn't been directly studied yet. But the pieces that *have* been studied line up in a way that makes the original hypothesis reasonable rather than far-fetched:

- A facial muscle tied to focused effort (the same one used in squinting) has been shown, through Botox research, to causally affect the intensity and speed of related mental processing when it's blocked.

- The effect is specific — it targets exactly the kind of processing tied to that muscle, not general thinking ability.

- The effect is reversible, not permanent — brain activity returns to normal once the muscle becomes available again.

- Underlying judgment and capacity stay intact even when the muscle is blocked; what changes is ease and intensity, not the basic ability to think clearly.

- Deliberately retraining an underused muscle-based connection, through repeated and purposeful practice, has been shown to meaningfully improve the associated mental skill.

Put together, these findings support a plausible middle-ground version of the original idea: someone who has spent a long time deliberately avoiding squinting might feel less immediate comfort or fluency dropping into narrow, detail-focused thinking — not because they've lost the ability, but because one of the body's natural on-ramps to that mode has gone quiet from disuse. And based on the retraining research, that on-ramp appears to be something a person could deliberately reopen, especially once they have a clear reason to.

What remains open is whether this same pattern — proven for emotional processing — carries over to purely analytical, detail-focused thinking, since no study has tested that combination directly yet. That's a real gap in the research, not a settled answer, and it would take a dedicated study to close it.

SOURCES

Havas, D. A., Glenberg, A. M., Gutowski, K. A., Lucarelli, M. J., & Davidson, R. J. (2010). Cosmetic use of botulinum toxin-A affects processing of emotional language. *Psychological Science*, 21(7), 895–900.

Kim, M. J., Neta, M., Davis, F. C., Ruberry, E. J., Dinescu, D., Heatherton, T. F., Stotland, M. A., & Whalen, P. J. (2014). Botulinum toxin-induced facial muscle paralysis affects amygdala responses to the perception of emotional expressions: Preliminary findings from an A-B-A design. *Biology of Mood & Anxiety Disorders*, 4, 11.

Hennenlotter, A., Dresel, C., Castrop, F., Ceballos-Baumann, A. O., Wohlschläger, A. M., & Haslinger, B. (2009). The link between facial feedback and neural activity within central circuitries of emotion. *Cerebral Cortex*, 19(3), 537–542.

Baumeister, J. C., Papa, G., & Foroni, F. (2016). Deeper than skin deep — The effect of botulinum toxin-A on emotion processing. *Toxicon*, 118, 86–90.

Neal, D. T., & Chartrand, T. L. (2011). Embodied emotion perception: Amplifying and dampening facial feedback modulates emotion perception accuracy. *Social Psychological and Personality Science*, 2(6), 673–678.

Navon, D. (1977). Forest before trees: The precedence of global features in visual perception. *Cognitive Psychology*, 9(3), 353–383.

Efficacy of facial exercises in facial expression categorization in schizophrenia. (2021). *International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health* (PMID 34206553).

Teunisse, M., Koevoet, D., Baarda, Y., Paffen, C. L. E., Van der Stigchel, S., & Strauch, C. (2025). Pupil size tracks attentional breadth in the Navon task. *Perception* (Sage).

*This piece draws on peer-reviewed research located through literature search. Readers interested in the full methodological detail behind any of these findings are encouraged to consult the original studies directly.*