I’d like to go on the record and say Monday mornings are an acceptable time to have ‘resting bitch face’, especially after a weekend as festive as the one that has just come and gone.

The thing is that term has now been scientifically proven, so throwing it around (whilst not encouraged, workplace morale yo) doesn’t mean you can be shunned at the lunch table any longer.

Two behavioural scientists, Jason Rogers and Abbe Macbeth, conducted an in-depth analysis with some highlights below from NY Mag:

Rogers and Macbeth used Noldus’s FaceReader, a software that utilizes a directory of 10,000 human faces to identify facial expressions. The FaceReader scrutinizes a face and maps 500 points on it, then analyzes it. Based on its extensive catalogue, the FaceReader is able to assign one of eight human emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, and — the one connected with RBF — “neutral”…

There are two intriguing conclusions from this experiment of a machine reading facial expressions. One is that FaceReader senses something off-putting about some otherwise neutral visages. In other words, our human tendency to classify someone with a sullen and miffed expression as possessing RBF isn’t necessarily off.

The second point: This is not a strictly female phenomenon. Discussions over RBF may have launched based on how a certain population of female celebrities would show up on the red carpet refusing to flash their pearly whites for cameras, but Macbeth and Rogers found that the expression can be detected equally in both males and females.

You see that Kanye, you are a bitch. Just like Amber Rose said then…

[source:nymag]