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Botox made people worse at faces
The emotion test
Online emotion tests show a face and four possible emotions. Naming the exact one is surprisingly hard, yet there seems to be a correct answer. People who are plugged in socially tend to do well on them, and more left-brain people tend not to.
Mimicry and the Botox result
In the experiment as remembered, people who had freshly gotten Botox took a pretest and a post-test, and they were much worse at reading expressions the second time. The thought is that part of understanding an emotion is doing it yourself. At a subconscious level you see a face, mimic it with your own face muscles, and recognize it as anxiety.
What it means for language models
By the same logic, a language model that knows everything people wrote has no face muscles to mimic with. Its brain works completely differently, so putting itself in someone else's shoes would have to emerge some other way.
How does Botox freeze facial muscles?
Botox is a purified form of botulinum toxin. It blocks nerve endings from releasing acetylcholine, the chemical that tells a muscle to contract. Without that signal, the injected muscle cannot move until the nerve endings regrow, which takes a few months. The muscle itself is unharmed, and the face loses movement in just that area.
Is there research behind the Botox study?
Psychologists David Neal and Tanya Chartrand published a study in 2011 comparing people who had Botox with people who had a dermal filler that leaves the muscles working. The Botox group did worse on a test of reading emotions from photographs of eyes. The idea they tested is called the facial feedback hypothesis, and it traces back to Charles Darwin's writing on emotion.
How do people mimic faces without noticing?
In the early 1980s, Ulf Dimberg recorded electrical activity in volunteers' facial muscles while they looked at photographs. The cheek muscles that form a smile became active when they viewed happy faces, and the brow muscles that frown became active for angry faces. This happened within about half a second, and in later work it occurred even when the images were flashed too briefly to see consciously.
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