EMOTION BIAS AND GENDER

The pop culture phenomenon of resting bitch face has been discussed frequently through anecdotal and observational evidence. However, it has not been formally studied as a perceptual bias. In this study, we hypothesized that gender would affect perception of emotion and thatparticipants would rate women’s neutral resting faces more negatively than men’s neutral restingfaces. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed data from 90 participants who completed an online survey containing 156 trials of face stimuli. These faces included happiness, disgust, and neutral facial emotions. The data collected in this study revealed that the main effects of the variables sex of face and emotion were significant. The interaction between sex of face and emotion was also statisticallysignificant. Planned contrasts revealed that women’s neutral resting faces were rated more negatively than men’s neutral resting faces, women’s disgust faces were also rated more negatively than men’s disgust faces, and female happy expressions were judged as slightly more positive than male’s happy expressions. We also found an effect of gender of the participants for the disgust emotion, as women rated the emotion of disgust more negative compared to men. Therefore, we conclude that there is a significant difference between how expressions of emotion are rated based on gender, and the gender of the participant may also have small effect on perception. Thus, the pop culture phenomenon of resting bitch face can be defined as a perceptual bias related to gender, and there are other gender-based biases that should be studied more extensively. Understanding perceptual biases are key to creating awareness of how implicit judgements impact daily behavior and treatment of specific populations.