Every day doctors and scientists go to work to try to cure the myriad of diseases and disorders that ravage our population. And every day some people go to work and try to figure out what’s up with Resting Bitch Face.
For anyone who is unfamiliar, RBF refers to people whose natural resting expression looks especially pissed off. It’s usually pointed out in women—Kirstin Stewart is often lambasted for it—but Kanye West is also a public sufferer.
Sure, in the scheme of things there are worse problems to have. But spending energy on not accidentally looking mad is pretty tiring. Unfortunately there is no cure, so if this sounds like you sadly you’ll still have to put up with strangers on the street telling you to smile. But behavioural researchers Jason Rogers and Abbe Macbeth from Noldus Information Technology can at least offer an explanation to why some faces can appear blank while others always look like someone farted.
The duo used their work’s FaceReader—a tool that identifies specific expressions from a catalogue of more than 10,000 images of human faces—to track the tiny changes on resting faces. The FaceReader uses a camera and especially designed software to map 500 points on a human face then analyses the data to assign an expression: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, and neutral.
Abbe explained their impulse to use such an impressive piece of tech to explain a meme as, “We wanted this to be fun and kind of tongue-in-cheek, but also to have legitimate scientific data backing it up.” For their experiment they first establishing a baseline by showing FaceReader a series of truly expressionless faces and measured the levels of emotion it picked up. As expected, it only reported “little blips of emotion.”
Then they uploaded images of Kanye West, Kristen Stewart and Queen Elizabeth—immediately the emotion detected doubled. But more tellingly, the primary emotion flagged was contempt—which if you need a visual, really does look like this.
So there you have it. Resting Bitch Face is real. It’s not treatable, but take comfort in the fact that somewhere a computer also thinks you look like a jerk.
Credits
Words Wendy Syfret