“The face is the mirror of the soul.” But what if the relationship goes much deeper than that?
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Hi, everyone. My name is Michelle Gellis, and I am an acupuncture physician. I would like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for this opportunity to talk to you today
I want to talk to you today about something I think about every single time I work on a patient’s face. We’ve all heard the expression, “The face is the mirror of the soul.” But what if the relationship goes much deeper than that? What if the face isn’t just reflecting our inner world, but actually shaping it?
Today, I want to explore what I call the emotional feedback loop of the face, the bidirectional conversation between our expressions, our nervous system, our organs, and our qi. I want to show you why this matters profoundly, both as acupuncturists and as people living in a world that is increasingly interfering with that loop.
Let’s start with the Western research, because it’s very fascinating, and it directly validates what Chinese medicine has understood for thousands of years. In psychology, there is something called the facial feedback hypothesis. The basic idea is this. Your facial expressions don’t just communicate your emotions to the world, they actually generate emotional states within you.
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The face sends signals back to the brain. It is not a one-way street. This idea goes back to Charles Darwin. In my book, Treating the Face, I talk about research that was done And by Charles Darwin, and it really gained momentum in 1988 when researchers Strack, Martin, and Stepper conducted a now famous experiment.
They asked participants to hold a pen between their teeth, which forces a smile, or between their lips, which prevents smiling. Those holding the pen in their teeth rated cartoons as significantly funnier. They were smiling without knowing it, and their brains responded accordingly. A large international study published in Nature Human Behavior, nearly four thousand participants, nineteen countries, found that when people deliberately mimic a smile, it amplifies and even initiates feelings of happiness.
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Think about what this means clinically. The muscles of the face are not just motors for expression. They are afferent transmitters sending information back to the brain, back to the nervous system, back to the organs. When we activate the corrugator muscles, the muscles that are between the eyebrows, we don’t just look concerned, we begin to feel concerned Now here’s where it gets really interesting for our purposes as practitioners.
Botulism toxin, known by the brand name Botox, Dysport, Xeomin, works by paralyzing the muscles of facial expression. Researchers have used this as a natural experiment to study what happens when you interrupt that feedback loop, and the results are striking. When people see a happy or angry face, they unconsciously mimic that expression.
But Botox prevents that muscle reaction, and it scrambles the brain’s ability to interpret other people’s emotions. In one study People who were using Restylane, which is a filler, not a muscle paralyzer, read emotions with seventy-seven percent accuracy. Botox users, only seven– seventy percent. We don’t just see someone else’s expressions, we mirror it micro-muscularly, and that mirroring is how we understand what they feel.
If you paralyze the muscle, you lose part of your emotional translation system. Research also found that Botox to the crow’s feet, those little laugh lines on the sides of your eyes, was associated with increased depression scores and reduced emotion recognition. Freeze the muscles of a real smile. So you only get those when you’re smiling really big, like a genuine smile, and when you freeze them, you reduce the feedback that tells your brain you are experiencing joy.
There is a paradox here, though. If you use Botox in the globu-ellar lines between the eyebrows, it can actually reduce depression because you can’t frown deeply, and they receive less negative feedback associated with worry and sadness. So in some cases, Botox reduces depression, but it also reduces the full range of emotional experience.
It creates what I like to call emotional flattening. If you lose the lows, you also are gonna lose some of the highs, and you lose your ability to fully read the people around you. As acupuncturists, we need to know that when we’re treating patients, if they’ve had these sorts of injections, it can affect them.
Their facial feedback system has been altered, and we can discuss that with them gently and professionally and from a deep place of knowledge. Now, I want to bring this to something even more fundamental. This isn’t just about adults choosing cosmetic procedures. This is about how we develop emotionally as human beings from the very beginning of life.
When children are very young, newborns, they are going to show a preference for their mother’s face within hours of being born. Newborns only hours old have been found to copy facial expressions, making an O with their lips or sticking out their tongues. This is remarkable because they’ve never seen their own face.
They are not learning through language. They are learning through instruction. They are learning through mirroring through the face. Research published in Scientific Reports found how much a mother’s– how much a mother mirrors her baby’s face in the first two months, and the mirroring that goes on between the mother and the child and how much mirroring occurs actually shapes the baby’s developing neural pathways and their ability to process expression for years to come Mirror neurons may be central to this process.
When we observe an emotional state in someone else, the mirror activity occurs in our own emotional center. We feel a version of what they feel through our face. So think about what happens in a family where expression is habitually suppressed. When parents chronically hold tension in their jaw, guard their brow, tighten around the eyes, children are literally learning to hold these same patterns in their own faces, and those muscular patterns are sending feedback to their developing nervous systems, shaping how they experience and regulate emotions for decades.
This is not abstract. This is psychology, and it is something Chinese medicine has always understood. In the Chinese medi– in Chinese medicine, the face is never separate from the whole person. Every zone of the face reflects organs. Every line, every color, every area of tension, it tells a story about the internal landscape.
The brow, the corrugator, the procerus belong to the liver. Chronic furrowing here reflects constraint of liver qi, the holding in of frustration and anger that has nowhere to go. And as Western research now confirms, that muscular tension is not just a symptom. It is perpetuating the emotional state.
It is feeding it back into the system. So this is not just carrying a meat suit around. The expressions that we hold back here are going to have an effect on the health of our organ systems. The area around the mouth, the obicularis oris, the depressor anguli oris, these all belong to our ability to feel joy and express joy.
And if these muscles have been paralyzed, then we cannot fully express joy. And if someone has experienced loss, chronic sadness, unexpressed grief, we can see this here also through the large intestine channel. The corners of the mouth will pull down, and that downward pull is sending information back to the nervous system.
Something’s wrong. Something’s been lost. What we are looking at when we look at the face is not just age. It is the history of a person’s emotional life written in their muscle, fascia, and qi. And what makes facial acupuncture so profound and so different from anything else we do is that we are intervening in that feedback loop.
We are releasing the muscular holding patterns that have been perpetuating emotional states, sometimes for decades. We are restoring the flow of qi through the channels that govern the emotional experience and helping the face and therefore the whole person In part two, we are going to go deeper into specific techniques on how to work with these patterns clinically I would like to thank the American Acupuncture Council again for this opportunity to speak to you today and make sure to check out part two