Scientists Have Discovered What Causes Resting Bitch Face

Many of your favourite celebs do it. You probably do it. Ya know Kristen Stewart? She's basically a poster girl for it.

Resting Bitch Face Syndrome.

Many are mocked for it and they're mainly females - though Kanye is a great male example. They kind of unintentionally look vaguely annoyed, maybe a little judgy, perhaps slightly bored.

It's a phenomenon now. So Jason Rogers and Abbe Macbeth, behavioral researchers with international research and innovation firm Noldus Information Technology, decided to investigate: Why are some faces seen as truly expressionless, but others are inexplicably off-putting? What, exactly, makes us register a seemingly neutral expression as RBF?

“We wanted this to be fun and kind of tongue-in-cheek, but also to have legitimate scientific data backing it up,” Macbeth said.

They used Noldus’s FaceReader, a sophisticated tool engineered to identify specific expressions based on a catalogue of more than 10,000 images of human faces. It can look at faces through a live camera, a photo or a video clip. It then maps 500 points on the human face, analyzes the image and assigns an expression based on eight basic human emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, and “neutral.”

To establish a baseline, Rogers and Macbeth first had FaceReader assess a series of genuinely expressionless faces. Those expressions registered about 97 percent neutrality, Macbeth said; the remaining three percent included “little blips of emotion” — a touch of sadness here, a hint of surprise there, but nothing significant.

Then they plugged in photos of RBF all-stars Kanye West, Kristen Stewart and Queen Elizabeth. Suddenly, the level of emotion detected by the software doubled to six percent.

One particular emotion was responsible for the jump: “The big change in percentage came from ‘contempt,’” Macbeth said.

How does it measure someone looking 'contempt'?

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.

The machine detects and interprets them the same way our human brains do, she said. “Something in the neutral expression of the face is relaying contempt, both to the software and to us.”

Worried that you might have RBF? Now you can find out for sure. After publishing their results, Rogers and Macbeth invited members of the public to submit their own faces for analysis. You guys are actually welcome to email photos of your most “neutral” facial expressions to [email protected], and FaceReader will tell you if you’re actually expressionless — or if you suffer from RBF.