Which comes first? Are you smiling because you’re feeling happy, or do you feel happy because you’re smiling? Do you frown because you’re feeling cross, or do you feel cross because you’re frowning?

We like simple cause and effect. Crossness causes frowns. Happiness causes smiles. But facial expressions are not always and invariably a consequence of emotion. Facial expressions can also generate emotion.

We often think of actors as ‘temperamental’ – but what if constantly adopting the expressions of anger, sadness, aggression, etc actually makes you feel that way? Method acting emotions could end up giving you the real thing. Facial expression don’t just reflect but also form the way that we feel. Botox anyone?

An intriguing study shows that Botox injections can help make you feel happier because you cannot frown while the Botox is paralyzing your facial muscles. Frowning sends signals to the brain which can make you feel irritable or sad. Not only that, but frowning sends signals to other people that you are not in a good mood, and they tend to frown in response – which, in a feedback loop, can also make you feel down, and isolated.

Obviously, if someone is really depressed then it’s likely that many of their basic needs are not being satisfied, and Botox alone could only ever be a partial solution, but it’s conceivable that such a treatment could at least get the ball rolling by lifting their mood enough for them to start getting their emotional and physical needs properly met.

Mind you, I’m not particularly advocating Botox as a depression treatment, but there is a wider point here. Therapeutic interventions which may look as if they are only addressing a small part of the problem (like setting behavioral tasks as part of the recovery program) can have a much greater impact through ‘ripple effect’ than is necessarily immediately obvious.

Which is something to smile about.