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Botox can fix your marriage and your mood: doc

Forget couple’s therapy: Botox could save your marriage.

Washington, DC-based dermatologist Eric Finzi theorizes that the popular injectable toxin could actually make you less depressed and appear less angry, keys to a happier marriage, in his new book “The Face of Emotion.”

Finzi, who often prescribes Botox to depressed patients, writes about Jane, who visited the doctor to remove her frown lines and received an unexpected bonus: Her husband no longer could tell when she was angry.

“Now he asks, ‘Are you mad, Babe?’ And I’ll say no, and he believes me!” Finzi quotes Jane in his book. “We get along so much better now.”

She not only appeared less angry, he writes, but she felt less rage “at least in part because of her inability to frown.”

Finzi has based these conclusions on his own clinical trials of Botox in depressed patients and others that reveal the link between facial expression and emotional state.

“Evidence suggests that our facial expressions are not secondary to, but rather a central driving force of, our emotions,” he writes. Basically, sad thoughts increase frowning; and frowning increases sad thoughts (the inverse is true for smiling).

Botox — which essentially paralyzes the frown muscles — prevents these muscles from contracting, making it more difficult to scowl. An outcome of this is that patients reportedly feel less depressed, he writes.

Though touted by Finzi, Botox has its critics. According to experts, the toxin can spread from the injection site to other places in the face, paralyzing places that were not intended.

It can also cause headaches, droopy eyelids and other harmful effects.

Researchers have found that comprehending emotions in others is impaired after Botox shots.

In one study, women who received injections in their eyes were less accurate in their assessments of people’s emotions in photographs than women with placebo shots.

In another study published in Psychological Science, reducing the ability to frown actually impairs the comprehension of angry and sad sentences.

But Finzi devotes little of his book to the possible negatives of the procedure.

Instead, he points to a study in which depressed patients who were injected with Botox showed a 47-percent reduction in psych scores that qualified them as depressed, as compared to a 9 percent increase in those who received a placebo.

Even nondepressed patients see a bump in self-esteem after the injections, he writes.