You’ve had Botox, you’re looking at least 10 years younger, and you’re celebrating. But consider this before you slide into the aesthetician’s chair for your next treatment: That injectable fountain of youth may prevent you from fully understanding the emotions of others, including your own kids’ feelings.

“The problem with starting Botox is that once you start, it’s hard to stop,” said one woman.

“[Botox] likely does limit and distort parent-infant communication, possibly making the parent look ‘flat’ emotionally,” Dr. Ed Tronick, associate professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts, told CNN. “Facial expressions for parents and young children are really critical ways in which we communicate our intentions or whether we’re angry or sad, and that involves this very complex array of all the muscles that go into making facial expressions.”

A new study from Italy finds that Botox blocks something called “proprioceptive feedback,” a physiological process that helps us to understands another’s emotions by replicating them in our own bodies.

Here’s how it works. When someone smiles at you, you smile back automatically — even if only slightly. It’s a part of the process that helps you understand what the other person is feeling. But when Botox temporarily paralyzes your facial muscles, you cannot replicate emotion — so your own understanding of another’s emotion may be more difficult.

Still, the lure of “frozen in time” is strong. Who isn’t tempted by turning back the clock a little bit? When told of this new research, one Boston area-woman, 45, didn’t feel it was enough to make her avoid the needle.

“The problem with starting Botox is that once you start, it’s hard to stop,” she said. “It really gives you such a youthful look that when you stop, and the muscles droop and the wrinkles come back, and you just look that much older. It makes me feel more attractive and more confident, so I do it. Of course, if I noticed my kids were crying and I was standing there staring at them like a mannequin, of course I’d stop.”

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Subtle expressions are the ones at risk of being missed, the Italian research noted, according to Science Daily. And both in judgment and reaction times, the effect of the paralysis was obvious, said Jenny Baumeister, lead author of the new study published in Toxicon and a research scientist at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy.

For their research, Baumeister and her team asked a group of subjects to perform a series of tests to assess their understanding of emotions immediately before — and two weeks after — they had a Botox-based aesthetic procedure. She then compared the measurement with a similar group of subjects who had not undergone any Botox treatment.

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“The negative effect is very clear when the expressions observed are subtle,” Baumeister concluded.

“When the smile is wide and overt, the subjects were still able to recognize it, even if they’ve had the treatment,” explained study coordinator and SISSA researcher Francesco Foroni. “For very intense stimuli, although there was a definite tendency to perform worse, the difference was not significant. On the other hand, for ‘equivocal’ stimuli that are more difficult to pick up, the effect of the paralysis was very strong.”

If emotions expressed more subtly — a small tightening of lips, a slight frown, an almost imperceptibly furrowed brow — are missed by the 4,250,000 Americans who receive Botox each year, where does that leave us?

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“This brings to mind actresses before Botox,” 77-year-old Jean Primm of Columbia, Maryland, told LifeZette. “The wonderfully aged faces full of character — Bette Davis, for example. Can you imagine her without those subtle facial movements that made her acting so vivid? Talk about a withering glance! Now all of Hollywood looks alike from the neck up — although the hands and neck always show age no matter what is going on in your face.”

As early as 2011, social psychologists were studying how Botox affects emotion. Many jokes have been made about how those who use Botox seem devoid of emotion, and researchers at University of Southern California decided to see if there was any truth behind the jokes. The USC study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, was conducted with Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

If emotions expressed subtly — a small tightening of lips, a slight frown — are missed by the 4,250,000 Americans who receive Botox each year, where does that leave us?

The researchers did two experiments: The first group of subjects was comprised of 31 women who had received either Botox or Restylane, a dermal filler that smooths wrinkles — but doesn’t affect facial movement. In a second group, 56 women and 39 men were given a topical facial gel that functioned as a so-called “anti-Botox” — it increased signals to facial muscles.

All participants were asked to look at a series of faces on a computer screen and identify the displayed emotions.

Interestingly, the researchers found that compared with the Restylane-treated control group, the women who got Botox were less able to read emotions based on facial expression.

The participants who got the gel were better than all others at perceiving emotions.

“When you mimic, you get a window into their inner world,” said lead researcher David Neal, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, in a release. “When we can’t mimic, as with Botox, that window is a little darker.”