I have been thinking about faces again\u2014what they say, what we see in them, and how closely those two things are related. As someone who frequently hears things like \u201cwhat are you mad about?\u201d and \u201cyou look like you want to say something\u201d (derogatory) when I feel as though my mind is in a nearly blank, nirvana-esque state, I have a particular personal interest in the topic. Some of my best friends have told me they were convinced I hated them before they got to know me. Years ago, our culture referred to my condition using a moderately profane (and pretty clearly misogynistic) abbreviation for my condition: RBF. I guess for me, maybe we can call it Resting Bastard Face? <\/p>\n
In any case, the eleven of you who follow my work may know that my interest in phenomena such as these is also professional. I have published work in which I examine personality<\/a> judgments made from photographs of faces (e.g., Beer, 2013, 2014), and I am far from alone in my interest in what can be conveyed by the face (e.g., Naumann et al., 2009; Engell, Todorov, & Haxby, 2010). Rather than recapitulate some of these findings (in short, there is some evidence that your level of extraversion<\/a> is somewhere in your face, somehow), I think it may be instructive for our current purposes to instead summarize some anecdotes from doing this kind of work. <\/p>\n Reactions to “Neutral” Faces<\/p>\n Years ago, as part of an ambitious (and thus only partially completed) project, I asked research participants to pose for 6 photographs in which they were asked to look, separately: happy, sad, angry, surprised, afraid, and neutral. The idea was that I would use these photos in future studies of personality judgment, and I did. In my first large scale study using these photos I decided to display the neutral expression to participants. This was an effort to reduce problems with individual differences in expressivity\/direction-following\/theatrical training\/etc. I believe it was at the end of my very first session, during the debriefing\u2014in which I explain why we\u2019ve been here for an hour looking at photos of strangers and quietly judging them\u2014that I first heard the question I would hear many times going forward: \u201cInteresting. Ok, so why were they all mad?\u201d<\/p>\n I frantically dug through my photo database to ensure that I had not made some terrible mistake in either selecting or labeling the photographs. I had not. I had indeed provided the \u201cneutral\u201d photographs. So why were they all mad? Or, why did they look mad enough that the question from the participant (and my own quick look at the photos) made me doubt my clerical and managerial abilities? I wasn\u2019t sure, and in the years since, my stock answer has been, basically: \u201cI don\u2019t know, but you’re not alone in seeing it this way\u2014they believe this is their neutral face.\u201d<\/p>\n Technical Terms<\/p>\n Knowing that psychologists love to examine pop culture phenomena, I went searching for literature on the topic. My first discovery was that the condition formerly known as RBF is now called PRNE (Perceived Resting Negative Emotion<\/a>). I know, boring<\/a>, but more accurate in that it specifies that this is a perception (not necessarily reality) and a gender<\/a>-neutral phenomenon. Hester (2018) demonstrated some interesting effects regarding PRNE by examining ratings of neutral photos from the Chicago Face Database<\/a> (CFD; Ma, Correll, & Wittenbrink, 2015). The author calculated a PRNE score from the impressions that coders had of the presence of negative (or positive) emotions in these neutral photos and connected these scores to ratings of both threat and attractiveness<\/a> in men and women. They found that:<\/p>\n \u201cPRNE negatively predicts attractiveness, especially for female targets, and positively predicts threat, especially for male targets. Furthermore, threat may account for why PRNE predicts attractiveness more strongly for women; female targets with greater PRNE seem more threatening and thus less attractive (for male targets, threat is unrelated to attractiveness).\u201d <\/p>\n Basically, the RBF slur implies unattractiveness, but the route may be via threat. Perceived negative emotions may arouse perceived threat (hard to say which has primacy from this design and analysis) when viewing both men and women, but it is only in women that that \u201cthreatening\u201d can morph into \u201cunattractive\u201d. This may explain why my friends said they thought I wanted to harm them but not that I was ugly. They at least didn\u2019t say that other part out loud.<\/p>\n A Hypothesis Unsupported<\/p>\n While I was unsurprised to see that psychologists had been tackling this question, my particular interest was actually somehow more boring than the above investigation. I was curious about the extent to which we simply perceive neutral faces as \u201cnegative,\u201d with my lay hypothesis being something along the lines of the big reveal in The Walking Dead: that we are all infected with RBF (or RTF? Resting Threat Face?), at least to some extent. Perhaps it should just be called RF. <\/p>\n Luckily, the CFD provides norms for perceived emotions in neutral photos. The average neutral face scores about 2.5 for the various negative emotions rated in the CFD (e.g., anger<\/a>) on a 1 (not at all) to 7 (extremely) scale (Ma et al., 2015). But this number is the same for ratings of happiness<\/a> in neutral faces. So while neutral expressions do not convey zero emotion at all, my theory (shared by many of my study participants) that all resting faces are angry is likely unsupported. Perhaps my batch of 218 photographed participants were particularly high in PRNE, or perhaps the perceivers expected the people in the photos to be smiling\u2014as people often do in photos\u2014and the violation was jarring. <\/p>\n First Impressions Essential Reads<\/p>\n Relatedly, I would suggest that viewing a resting face in the wild is actually\u2026rather uncommon. Both conscious observance of social norms and a lifetime of conditioning should mean that when we are engaging with others, our faces do\u2026something\u2026anything\u2026most of the time. Hence, viewing a resting or neutral face might just mean the individual is currently disengaged, perhaps even at a moment when you expect them to be engaged. Somehow, this is threatening. And I guess if you are a woman, unattractive. I suppose if you are a woman who receives the dreaded \u201csmile more, honey\u201d greeting from a strange man, just understand that this is coming from a place of fear<\/a>. Perhaps what he sees is Resting Power Face. I also suppose one protective solution for all of us would, unfortunately, be to pose a smile at all times, but I think this has the potential to backfire in numerous ways (my fake smile may be more threatening than my neutral face, to be honest). So my advice would instead be for perceivers: Sometimes faces aren\u2019t for you. Resist the urge to interpret. Be open to the possibility of nirvana behind the eyes of strangers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I have been thinking about faces again\u2014what they say, what we see in them, and how closely those…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":660035,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-660034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/660035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}