The term 'Resting Bitch Face' has been bandied about for years, and it you're one of the unfortunate ones who has been branded with it, you know it's a hard one to shake off.
You may be staring vacantly into space, imagining puppies playing with brightly-coloured balloons in a field full of sunflowers, but your friends, family and colleagues are somehow under the impression you're plotting their death.
Eager to get to the bottom of the RBF phenomenon, behavioural scientists, Jason Rogers and Abbe Macbeth, set about analysing the specific features which comprise the now infamous expression.
The experts from research firm, Noldus Information Techonolgy, approached their task by seeking to establish the difference between a neutral face and a supposedly 'RB' face by using the firm's FaceReader - a piece of software which contains 10,000 human faces as a method of identifying specific expression.
The FaceReader assigns one of eight human emotions to a face including happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, and - the one we understand to be connected with RBF - neutral.
According to the researchers, the FaceReader then assessed a variety of blank faces and established that 97% were dubbed 'neutral' while 3% were tinged with sadness or disgust.
Using high-profile figures, such as Kanye West and Kristen Stewart, both known for their own particular RBFs, researchers found that the percentage immediately doubled to 6% - an increase which was established by subtle facial cues such as a slight snarl of the lips or squint of the eye.
The researchers concluded that in some cases a person's naturally neutral expression may contain elements of other emotions meaning that if you have been accused of sporting a RBF, your accuser may just be on to something!
Commenting on their research, Macbeth told the Washington Post: "We wanted this to be fun and kind of tongue-in-cheek, but also to have legitimate scientific data backing it up."
Focusing attention on the notion that RBF applies predominantly to women, Macbeth insists this theory is born of societal expectations of females, saying: "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 other," she concluded.
So, now we know!
