New data explains why some people look like they're not having any fun, ever.
Resting Bitch Face (or RBF) is real and present danger in our society. Anna Kendrick is a famous life-long sufferer of the disease:
Even though nothing is wrong, she still looks like she's completely pissed off. To help raise awareness of this tragic condition, the good people of the Internet even put together a public service announcement.
And now science has decided to step in and figure out what the hell is going on.
As per the study from The Washington Post:
The researchers enlisted Noldus’s FaceReader, a sophisticated tool engineered to identify specific expressions based on a catalogue of more than 10,000 images of human faces. The software, which can examine faces through a live camera, a photograph or a video clip, maps 500 points on the human face, then analyzes the image and assigns an expression based on eight basic human emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, and “neutral.”
The biggest indicator of RBF came from little facial cues. It’s in subtle signals, like “one side of the lip pulled back slightly, the eyes squinting a little,” Rogers explained. Or: “It’s kind of a tightening around the eyes, and a little bit of raising of the corners of the lips — but not into a smile,” Macbeth suggested.
"While we wouldn’t say Kanye is showing anger or disgust or any other 'negative' emotion, we know that he isn’t simply 'neutral' either," Rogers and Macbeth wrote. "Indeed, FaceReader registers those minute amounts of contempt that are simply not present in non-RBF 'neutral' faces."
Another source of perceived RBF is because you're a sexist jerk-off, too.
“[Smiling is] something that’s expected from women far more than it’s expected from men, and there’s a lot of anecdotal articles and scientific literature on that. So RBF isn’t necessarily something that occurs more in women, but we’re more attuned to notice it in women because women have more pressure on them to be happy and smiley and to get along with others.”
But ultimately, it comes down to the brain picking up on minute levels of contempt:
Although that face may not be intentional, the viewer’s brain is wired to analyze, and recognize, when a face is displaying even minute traces of contempt. Because contempt is based upon elements of comparison and judgment, viewing this in someone’s face creates a feeling of uneasiness, or uncomfortableness, for the person viewing that face.
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