New research suggests that women have a tendency to attribute more hostility to other women's faces than is actually present or intended. The notion of “resting bitch face”, the tendency for a woman’s neutral face expression to appear angry or annoyed, has been catching on in the media, including a recent piece in the New York Times(link is external). A series of new studies by Jaimie Arona Krems and her colleagues at the University of Arizona suggests that whether or not we see anger in a woman’s neutral face may be partially due to a tendency to see them as our sexual competition.1
Krems and colleagues investigated how women perceive anger in other women. According to the researchers, women face challenges in understanding if other women are threats for two reasons. First, women are more likely than men to eschew physical aggression in favor of indirect aggression.2,3 Indirect aggression can include gossiping, excluding others, and back-stabbing (Just think of the movie Mean Girls(link is external)). That makes women’s aggression more subtle and difficult to detect. Second, women may be more likely than men to mask their anger, making it especially tough to spot.
In order to determine if women really do mask their expressions of anger, particularly anger toward other women, the authors surveyed 218 adults about how likely they would be to put on various facial expressions in a given situation. For example, participants were asked to describe what sort of facial expression they would put on if they were at a funeral, but found something to be funny. Of interest to the researchers, was the expression they would put on when angry with a stranger. Some participants were asked to imagine they were angry at a male stranger, others at a female stranger. In most cases, participants reported they’d be more likely to show an angry than a neutral face when mad at a stranger – The one exception to this pattern was female participants reporting how they would react when angry at another woman. Women imagining how they’d react when angry at a female stranger claimed they were more likely to put on a neutral than an angry expression.
Given that women tend to mask their anger at other women, Krems and colleagues propose that women have developed a defense against aggression from other women. Specifically, the authors claim that women may be biased toward perceiving anger in other women’s faces, even if those women’s expressions are emotionally neutral. The authors argue that it’s more adaptive to have a few false alarms (perceiving non-threatening people as threatening) than to fail to notice a real danger. So women will err on the side of caution and over-perceive anger on the faces of other women.
In order to test this hypothesis, the authors conducted an additional experiment. In this study, 88 participants were asked to view a series of photographs of people making neutral face expressions. They were told that each person had just relived a particular emotion (e.g., anger, fear, pride) and then had tried to hide the emotion with a neutral expression. They were also told that traces of the emotion might still linger on the face, in the form of microexpressions. In fact, unbeknownst to the participants, all of the photos showed a completely neutral expression, and they were just randomly paired with the emotion information. Participants were then asked to rate the extent to which they felt each person was expressing various emotions.
The results showed that women were more likely than men to perceive anger in the female faces. And this wasn’t because women were just generally more likely to over-perceive anger in all faces – Women were more likely to see anger in female than in male faces. Moreover, this pattern of results only occurred for anger, and not for other emotions, suggesting that it’s specific to anger and not the case that women just read more emotions (of any type) into other women’s faces.
The authors also hypothesized that women who are sexual competition for other women, and thus potential targets for their aggression, will be the most prone to seeing anger in other women’s faces. Other research has shown that women who are sexually desirable or more sexually available tend to be the targets of this kind of aggression.4,5 Thus, the authors predicted that women who see themselves as sexually desirable would be especially prone to see anger in other women’s neutral face expressions.
In a third study of 56 adults, the authors repeated the emotional perception experiment, but this time, they also asked participants to report on their own sexual attractiveness and sexual availability (i.e., being open to casual sex and reporting more sexual partners). Their results once again revealed the bias for women to see anger in other women’s neutral faces. In addition, women who perceived themselves as desirable, or who were sexually available, exhibited this bias more than those who saw themselves as less desirable or available. The authors concluded that this bias is especially adaptive for these particular women because they are, in fact, most likely to be under threat from other women.
While these experiments provided nice control over the faces and expressions, I would still be curious how these effects play out when women are actually interacting with one another, rather than looking at out of context photos. Would additional situational context make women more or less likely to see anger in these neutral faces? And does this bias extend beyond facial expressions to the interpretation of tone of voice, gestures, or other behaviors? I would also suspect that the bias would be diminished or disappear if participants in the study had not been explicitly told that the people in the photos were masking their emotions.
This study also raises the question of whether or not this bias is likely to lead women to more accurately perceive other women’s emotions. In the last two experiments, all of the facial expressions really were neutral, but as the authors found in the first study, women’s neutral expressions with other women are more likely to mask angry feelings. So in the real world, the bias documented by the researchers may actually lead to more accurate perceptions. On the other hand, if actual neutral expressions are being seen as angry in a broad array of contexts, it is likely that the bias is leading women to false conclusions about one another.
The study's authors explain their findings in terms of sexual competition. However, it’s also quite possible that social norms contributed to their results. Women may mask anger because anger is seen as especially socially unacceptable for women to display. As the first study shows, women are aware of their own tendency to mask anger, so they may infer that other women are similar to them, and are also especially likely to mask anger. Therefore they may be projecting their own tendencies onto the women they’re viewing. Men, who may not be as aware of women’s tendency to mask anger, have less reason to suspect that a woman’s neutral face is hiding anger, and thus don’t have the same biased perceptions.
These findings do make me wonder if the perception of “resting bitch face” is born, in part, from sexual competition between women. Despite the popular notion that accusations of resting bitch face are products of sexism, the researchers found that men were actually just as likely to see anger in resting male faces as female faces. Thus, women seem to be the ones more likely to see a resting bitch face.
