Many of us graciously accept the fading from our cheeks of the plump, peachy shades of youth, as the trauma of our lives slowly becomes etched all over foreheads. But some people absolutely reject the idea of a sweet surrender and opt for cosmetic surgery. However, for those people who don’t want to suffer under the surgeon's knife, Botox injections offer a cheaper and faster solution to the deepening tramlines and crinkly crow's feet.
But the resulting, smooth, youthful looking skin may come at a much greater price than the just the cost of the injections. It might be at the expense of your charisma.
Everyone is attracted to somebody at sometime in his or her life and most of us have certainly experienced having an admirer - however briefly. After all, attraction is not just about physical appearance.
But how many of us would claim we have charisma?
I suspect very few. Mainly because most people don’t actually know what it is or how to find it. We just recognize it when we see, hear or feel it in other people.
After all it’s mainly famous pop stars, actors and public figures who get credited with having the magic quality of charisma. But there is growing evidence to suggest that more of us could have it than we realize.
So what is this elusive quality and why might Botox be bad for it?
Eminent psychologists such as Howard Friedman and Richard Wiseman have been studying charisma and have apparently discovered that it’s all to do with being highly expressive.
Professor Friedman of the University of California became curious about charisma in the 1980s - perhaps because of the sad lack of it during the decade of over-extended shoulder pads and the ‘greed is good’ mantra. Anyway he suspected it had to do with non-verbal behaviour so he created a test to try and find out. The Affective Communication Test or ACT for short allows people to self identify how easily they able are to express their emotions using their body and voice.
Test participants were asked to score themselves on a scale of 1-4 as to whether a statement was true or not about them. Statements similar to: “I am easily able to flirt with my eyes” or “I can easily communicate an emotion on the telephone.” The test was designed to identify whether someone was a high or low expressive person. In other words, were they able to unambiguously express emotions so that people around them could recognize what type of mood they were in.
After testing a random group Friedman and his team then paired two high-scoring individuals and invited them to sit in a room together with a pair of two low scorers for just two minutes. The subjects were allowed to look at each other but asked not to speak. After the experience they were invited to complete a questionnaire about how they felt during the experiment.
In every case they discovered that the low scorers had been affected by the mood of the high scorers, demonstrating that the presence of an expressive person communicating an emotion, even non-verbally, is powerful enough to have an affect on others. However the low scoring, less expressive people had little if no affect on the high scorers.
Friedman called this effect ‘emotional contagion’.
If we combine this with some interesting, recent studies of leaders in business we can begin to understand how emotion and charisma are linked.
Research conducted by two pairs of psychologists, Cote and Saavedra (2005) and Bono and llies (2006), came to similar conclusions by observing leaders interacting with their people. This body of research demonstrated that leaders considered to be charismatic transmit their emotions to followers more effectively, compared with non-charismatic leaders. Charismatic leaders were also observed to be able to literally change the mood of their employees merely by walking into a room. Their mood was communicated by the power of their presence and became contagious in a very short time.
So what was going on? How was the mood being communicated?
The answer may be staring us in the face.
Charles Darwin was the first to seriously study how our faces reflect and communicate our emotions and his work continues to influence contemporary thinkers in the field.
In the 1960s San Francisco psychologist Paul Ekman found that facial expressions do in fact indicate a person’s emotional state and are present in early infancy. Even a person born blind has the same facial expressions as someone who is sighted because facial expression is not simply learned it is hardwired into the brain and is universal in nature. Ekman discovered that many human facial expressions are common to all races and cultures around the world. In fact animators have utilised his findings and theories of ‘facial coding’ to make animated characters' faces appear more human.
Dan Hill is a psychologist working in the field of micro gestures and how they express and reveal emotions, particularly in the area of facial coding and eye tracking. He is interested in the science of emotions and how that might apply in the commercial market place of advertising. Hill says that the whole face is the window to the emotions not just the eyes because the 43 key facial muscles are attached directly to the skin of the face; therefore any spontaneous flickers of movement can easily be detected. Even though these movements are small and very quick we humans are natural, facial coders and can read what mood a person is in by their the micro facial gestures. In fact we rely on them particularly when verbal communication becomes confusing and difficult. Apparently we humans make our decisions emotionally but justify them rationally.
Nicholas Rule, a psychology professor at Tufts University, co-wrote a paper called "The Face of Success" which was published in the journal, Psychological Science, detailing his findings around people who were asked to identify successful, charismatic business leaders simply by looking at photographs of faces.
The study revealed that the test group were able to accurately guess levels of competence, dominance, likeability and trustworthiness just by looking at their facial expressions.
All this evidence seems to suggest that our ability to express emotion is in large part dependent on our facial expressions. If we have a few deep wrinkles then surely that must mean we have very expressive faces.
If the eminent professors are right then wrinkles equal, high emotional expression, which equals charisma. So we should proudly and without fear grab the magnifying mirror and take a good, close look, since the more wrinkles we have, the bigger our charisma.In which case having Botox injected into our faces is surely the equivalent of having a charisma bypass.
Pass me the sun lamp.
Tom
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