The Psychology of Resting Bitch Face Syndrome and What You Can Do About It
/~ 5 minute read
Resting Bitch Face, or RBF for short, is an increasingly rife cultural advent.
RBF describes a facial expression, or lack thereof, which unintentionally conveys a particular mix of irritation, judgement, or boredom. One journalist wrote of her own face in a New York Times piece on the subject:
“Essentially, someone displaying RBF might not be the kind of person you’d be inclined to ask for directions”
The phrase became popular following a 2013 parody which airs the collective grievances of unfortunate RBF casualties. Indeed, celebrity sufferers of RBF, like Anna Kendrick, Victoria Beckham, and Kristen Stewart, are frequently targeted by critics for their snarly demeanor, while others with neutral faces commonly perceived as happy, like Jennifer Aniston and Blake Lively, are largely spared of such character slandering.
As a psychologist, I became interested in the phenomenon when several clients reported they thought their RBF played a significant role in their current concerns.
For example, Paolo* a 20 something who suffered depression and low self-esteem said:
“I’m told all the time, something about my face just looks unapproachable. People get the wrong idea about me, judging me off the bat, thinking I’m judging them”
I found Paolo likable, but he was convinced this aspect of him caused the friendship dramas he often found himself having. What’s worse, Paolo believed these apparent judgments were insurmountable and beyond his control, saying “I can’t very well get a face transplant”, which contributed to his helplessness and social anxiety and often created a self-fulfilling prophecy for him in social situations. As one online author explained:
“it’s hard to express just how tough it is to walk around with the knowledge that how you come off to the world is so much different than how you see yourself. There’s the lingering sense that all the tangled feelings of self-loathing in your head are right, that there is something wrong with you that is palpable to everyone around you, and there’s nothing you can do about it”
Earlier this year researchers studied the phenomenon of RBF by comparing 10,000 images of neutral human faces with faces of celebrities identified as having RBF. They ran the images through software that maps 500 points on the face and analyses the image by assigning a degree of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, or neutrality. The control group of expressionless faces registered as 97% neutral, with small glimpses of other emotions like sadness, or surprise. In contrast, the expressionless faces of RBF celebrities registered as only 94% neutral, with twice as many miscellaneous emotion. Significantly, the control faces only showed 0.82% presence of contempt, while the RBF’s had 3.27%. That's nearly four times the contempt. Contempt registers on the face in the lips and eyes. One or both sides of the lips pull back, raised, but not into a smile. The eyes are slightly squinted, or somehow tightened. The researchers concluded that while the differences between neutral looking faces were subtle, the brain likely registers subtle signs of contempt on the outwardly neutral face in much the same way as the software.
However, the authors of this study didn't conclude whether the contempt was simply a result of the facial anatomy of RBF sufferers, or whether there was a genuine underlying emotional component. They suggested those prone to RBF may not be experiencing contempt at all, and may have just received the raw end of the genetic stick, and that future research should examine why some people have RBF, what it means in terms of a person’s psychology, and why people react so badly to it.
Yet other evidence suggests a biological propensity for women to experience and perceive RBF. In 2015 researchers asked women to demonstrate the facial expression they might put on in various situations. When asked how they would look when angry at a stranger, women more often showed an angry face if the stranger was a man, but a neutral face if the stranger were female. Participants were then asked to rate the perceived levels of micro-emotion in seemingly neutral faces, and results showed that while men were just as likely to see anger in resting male faces as in resting female faces, women were more likely to perceive anger in female faces. They also found that women who rated themselves as more sexually desirable and available were more likely to perceive anger in other women. The authors concluded that as women express anger indirectly, especially to each other, they have evolved to be hyervigilant to signs of threat in other women, particularly their sexual competitors. Yet this study does not resolve whether contemporary RBF is the result of unfair judgments put upon women we're jealous of, or whether it is saved for those women we legitimately notice as being unduly passive aggressive.
RBF sufferers themselves don’t tend to experience themselves as feeling contemptuous. As the parody explains:
“These women might be suffering without you even knowing it… they might just have faces that to you, look bitchy. They might not be bitches at all”
It can also be argued that as it’s most commonly women accused of having RBF, the phenomenon is more likely a learned artifact of social norms than anything depicting a true underlying emotional state. In support of this theory, much anecdotal research and scientific literature shows there’s more pressure on women imposed by men to be happy, smiley, and get along with others.
Actress Anna Kendrick has spoken publicly of the difficulties she’s faced in life as an RBF’er, explaining how when she was younger directors would say “Why don't you smile more, you need to smile more, you don't seem like you're very happy”.
It could be argued that what we label as RBF is simply women who aren’t afraid to be assertive. Male journalists remain neutral faced and are seen as calm and informative. Yet watch any current events program and you’ll notice their female counterparts grinning cheesily without remission.
As a woman, I definitely notice the pressure to constantly smile. It makes others uncomfortable when you don’t. And I feel resentful towards this pressure, faking a smile takes effort, and makes me feel disingenuous. One online author suggested:
“Maybe we can keep the acronym, but tweak a word. I propose ‘Resting Business Face’. Because bitches get stuff done”
Evidence suggests this smiling pressure is a relatively new cultural artifact. Researchers analyzed school yearbook pictures from the 1905 – 2013 and found the depth of smiles grew steadily over time, especially among women. In the 1900’s stony eyes and stern mouths were the norm. By the 1950’s people were grinning in their pictures. These days, men seem to smile as much as they did in the 1950’s, whereas women are smiling more than ever. Historians have explained that prior to the 1900’s smiles in portraiture were reserved for children and drunkards, and suggested that the photographic grin was invented post World War II by the camera industry entwined with the ideal of cheerfulness as an American cultural norm.
To this ends, some have argued that women could boycott the whole competitive phenomenon if they give up on trying to impress men with their passivity. As this author stated:
“Be angry, irritated, the girl who looks like she’ll bite your dick off, because there are not enough women in this world who actively try to terrify men, and maybe if there were, men wouldn’t have the balls to tell us to smile more… Be the woman who doesn’t give a shit what her face looks like and doesn’t care if you do either... Be the girl with the Resting Bitch Face, regardless of whether you’re a Resting Bitch or not”
While a free pass from smile duty may be tempting, we shouldn’t petition to free the bitch-face-ees or mount a pro-poker-face movement, just yet. There are good psychological reasons why our faces aren’t meant to be overly neutral.
While posing for the camera is a strictly learned habit that probably could go, spontaneous smiling is an essential biological reflex we share with babies and other primates that uses a different set of muscles to forced smiling.
Primates need the social gestures of the face and jaw to survive in the community, and like it or not, our gestures, body postures and facial expressions are necessary social signals that communicate faster than words and influence others.
photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/49968232@N00/3236956325">smile</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">(license)</a>
Steven Porges' Polyvagal theory explains that our autonomic nervous system develops in three hierarchical stages. Each stage built upon the last in the evolution of our species, and each is associated with a different adaptive physiological response to stress. Earliest down the phylogenetic tree, animals relied primarily on defense through immobilization, which meant slowing down the heart rate to reduce metabolic, oxygen, and food demands. As mammals evolved, their nervous systems became geared to mobilize into "fight or flight", increasing heart rate to respond to threat. Finally, some way down the track of our evolution, regulation of the heart was primarily outsourced to a new system called the Social Engagement System (SES). The most adaptive means humans have for regulating stress, the SES is turned on and off by the ventral vagal nerve. Sometimes called the vagal brake, the vagus is one of ten nerves which run from the brain and relay information throughout the body. It detects cues of safety from the sound of others voices, their facial expressions, and body gestures, which tell us it’s OK to put the brakes on a fight or flight response because we have supportive others around.
When activated, the SES induces visceral states in the body that promote growth and restoration. It blocks cortisol production associated with a mobilization stress response and cytokines that cause bodily oxidation and inflammation, and releases boding hormones such as oxytocin and vassopressin, along with growth hormone, and feel good neurotransmitters acetylocholine, GABA, and dopamine, lowering heart rate and blood pressure and increasing blood flow to the brain's frontal lobe.
This system is responsible for the feeling of being comfortable around someone whose voice and facial expressions make us feel calm. If you’ve ever felt loved up, or pumped up, after listening to certain music, this is the effect of the vagal nerve connecting the inner ear to heart functioning. If you’ve ever had someone talk over you, or not smile back at you, you’ve experienced what it feels like when your vagal break goes offline and your more primitive fight, flight, or freeze stress reactions kick in. You either start to wonder if you've done something wrong and feel intimidated, go on the offense, or worse you give in, withdraw, and give up on connecting. This is why people seem to have such beef with RBF. If someone's face doesn't send overt cues of safety then we're likely to feel a bit intimidated, taking the brakes off the fight or flight response.
I can hear the bitch face enthusiasts rallying as I type. "They need to harden up" they might say, "I'm no-one's walking talking nerve tonic".
I'm sympathetic to this view; a lot of time and opportunities are wasted on being too afraid of offending anyone to express ourselves authentically. However, as you understand how the SES works you see that making pleasing facial expressions isn't all about placating others' tender spirits.
The way the vagus nerve regulates heart activity is through feedback it receives from muscles of the face, ear, throat, and head. This means that for our own vagal brake to function, our face needs to be moving.
When you have a healthy SES, your face naturally tends to mirror the person you're interacting with. This was understood when in the 1990’s Italian researchers discovered what they called mirror neurons, which are nerve cells that fire both during the execution of an action, and when observing the action in another. This discovery changed how scientists understood human interactions, suggesting that by observing emotion in others, our mirror neuron system automatically simulates what is happening in their brain, often producing the same bodily sensations, facial expressions, and emotions they're experiencing. This is the neurological basis for empathy, allowing us to literally feel what the other person feels, which tells us we're safe in the interaction, and lets us experience a meaningful sense of connection.
If things go well in an interaction, the SES is stimulated. People mirror each other's emotional expressions, matching the uncomfortable ones with more cues of safety, like prosodic voice and positive facial affect, which over time create a positive feedback loop, until both people end up feeling calm and engaged. When we smile, it signals to the SES that we must be socially engaging with others in a way that's pleasing, humorous, tender, or otherwise constructive. Through a process termed neuroception, the body literally thinks “I’m smiling, so I must be safe”, and the positive visceral response of the SES is activated.
Charles Darwin wrote in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals:
“The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it. On the other hand, the repression, as far as this is possible, of all outward signs softens our emotions...”
Indeed, much evidence has since supported the facial feedback theory of emotion, which posits that physically expressing an emotion sends a biochemical signal from the facial muscles that loop back to the brain. The classic experiment which demonstrated this is was done in the 1980’s. Participants were asked to hold a pen in their mouth in a way that either facilitated or inhibited the muscles associated with smiling (e.g. on their top lip or in their teeth). The researchers found those with simulated smiles showed more intense humor responses to cartoons than those with simulated frowns. More recently, social psychologist Amy Cuddy explained this in her popular TED talk Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are.
If the muscles in our face are weak, lax, or generally not inclined towards putting their gym gear on, then our own SES doesn't function very well. We end up with lack of tone in muscles of the middle ear, larynx and pharynx, (leading to poor voice intonation and trouble hearing voices), and face (leading to a flat, unresponsive or unexpressive, bitchy looking appearance). This in turn reduces our ability to connect with others and freely experience positive affect.
Thus, micro-expressions of contempt could easily be the product of people in our face we don't know how to read. Along this line, several online articles written by RBF sufferers describe it as a defense mechanism. For example, as this Mic author explains:
“From my perspective, my RBF is inextricably linked with my genetic predisposition toward anxiety. I say this because I can pinpoint the exact moment that people kept telling me to smile more, and it was around the time that I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder in my early teens... other people were picking up on my anxiety and interpreting it as coldness, or even meanness”
photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/16688857@N03/28418515845">Phife is Living festival</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">(license)</a>
Research suggests people suffering psychiatric disorders, such a depression, anxiety, autism, schizophrenia, and personality disorders are likely to have deficits in the SES. For example, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is characterized by difficulties in relationships and extreme or dangerous attempts at regulating emotions. Porges and his team showed that people diagnosed with BPD did not show the same vagal braking of the stress response as control participants. Members of the control group showed a vagally mediated reduction in stress over the course of watching an emotional film, and became the calmest when the researcher entered the room. In contrast, the BPD group showed increased arousal throughout the film, which peaked when the experimenter entered, showing that rather than registering him as a sign of safety like control participants, their nervous system was unable to register and respond to the cues his SES was sending.
Having a poorly toned SES doesn’t necessarily mean you have a psychiatric disorder. Your muscles can be out of practice for various reasons. Varying levels of trauma or neglect, being raised by a depressed or anxious parent with poor vagal tone themselves, experiences of social rejection or bullying, and prolonged periods of isolation will all lead to a dysregulation of the SES. In my view, the internet culture of screen to screen interactions is a likely culprit for the epidemic of RBF that seems to have appeared in recent years. And don't get me started on Botox.
But fear not, like any muscle, the SES can be toned. And unlike the false promises triceps or glutes may offer, developing a hardworking face may actually turn out to be the missing link towards embodying your experience, feeling more positive emotions, and eliciting the positive reaction from others you desire. In fact, renowned psychiatrist Bessel Van De Kolk has often suggested the best treatment for many depressed or anxious people would be acting classes, to learn how to appropriately use their voices and faces, and understand how these things affect their own mood and others around them.
Any activities that work the muscles of the head, throat, ear, and heart will increase vagal tone. For example, pranayama yoga, OM chanting, and playing wind and rhythmic instruments are all great things to do regularly. Diaphragmatic breathing which involves breathing slowly and deeply into the belly making the exhale longer than the inhale is a simple thing you can practice anywhere. You can also try vocal toning simply by making “mmmm” sounds with your lips together and teeth slightly apart, listening intently as you experiment with changing the pitch and volume.
If you’d like to work on your RBF in particular, you can access the worksheet I use with clients to help them retrain the muscles of their face and enhance their use of the SES below. These activities helped Paolo get to the point where he could better activate his neuroception of safety in social interactions, which eliminated both his RBF, and the defensive cutting remarks he had a habit of making in the name of humor, of which he was previously not conscious, and were likely the primary cause of the friendship dramas that affected his self-esteem.
If you’re wondering where you sit on the RBF scale, you can upload a picture of your most neutral expression for analysis on to the Noldus website where the company behind the FaceReader software have invited people to "Test If I Have Resting Bitch Face".
* Names and some details have been changed to protect confidentiality
Thumbnail credit: PhotoPin
