To Prepare a Face to Meet the Faces That you Meet

            There’s a new acronym making the rounds, joining the internet’s WTF, LOL, IMHO, and such.  But this one is about real life, and it’s caught the attention of the New York Times, with an essay followed the next day by  “Readers Discuss” item.  Since such reader weigh-ins are quite rare (I could find only one other in the past three months), evidently we’re on to a new social issue of gender discrimination.  Except we’re not.

            The ugly term is “Resting Bitch Face,” described thus by the first writer to bring it up: “RBF is a face that, when at ease, is perceived as angry, irritated or simply … expressionless.”  Obviously the noun before face suggests that this is a problem for women rather than men.  Numerous readers replied, explaining that it’s just their face, that they’re always being told to smile more, that their father has the same expression and no one ever comments on it to him. 

            Why do I believe that this is almost entirely a non-issue? Well, for one thing, the case is largely bolstered by photos of actresses and other female celebrities, who are caught in hundreds of poses annually, some of which must be non-smiling.  Nor are non-smiling looks the result of gotcha shots.  I just looked at 40 Vogue covers.  Of the 40, only 4 showed a full smile, and one of those was of Audrey Hepburn.  The standard Vogue photo is serious, intense, often slightly aggressive.  Look at full-page ads in magazines and you see the same thing: more than half the women – and men – look bored or irritated.  My own emotional reaction to these pictures is that  these beautiful people are so superior to us that they needn’t deign to give us the benefit of a smile.

            As for ordinary life, here’s where we need to do something I usually don’t – go all evolutionary on the issue.  Why do we smile?  Because we want to send one of a very few messages: that we are harmless, that we are friendly, or that we hope you are harmless, friendly, and perhaps helpful.  Of course we can smile to ourselves, but most of those smiles come when we are having a mental or non-present-moment parallel to the others: reading or recalling something positive, seeing something non-human that we find funny, attractive, uplifting, etc.

            Start with babies.  We smile at them, get them to smile at us, and thereby make the most basic of human connections, after providing them with food.  Babies who never smile are of great concern, as they seem to lack normal affect.  As we grow older, we learn to smile when approaching people, when we want to ask them for something, when we recognize them, admire them, and so on.  Taking it back to adult evolution, smiles are one of the most obvious ways to say “I come in peace.”  Remember Mr. Spock?  Not only did he greet people with a weird hand signal, he maintained a stolid face more than 99% of the time.  (I found a fan site that catalogued Spock’s smiles: as a child before he learned Vulcan ways, when he was drugged, and once – a very important moment – when he finds out he has not, as he feared, killed Kirk.)  We smile, androids don’t.

            So smiling has always been one of the clearest signs that we are not an opponent and that we hope you aren’t either.  We have also become extremely adept at reading facial expressions, and again, see it as a sign of abnormalcy when someone can’t describe facial expressions accurately.  We know the Duchesne smile, where the involuntary movement of muscles near the eyes confirms that the mouth’s smile is real.  Evil smiles, cruel smiles, arrogant smiles, hopeful smiles, casual smiles, ecstatic smiles – we know them all.

            We also know the opposite of smiles.  We know when a parent is angry at us as soon as we see their face, sometimes even when we only see their eyes.  Even dogs react to frowns, especially when they connect the look to something they’ve just done. 

            So we have been wired from birth, and to some extent from a time when we had not yet split off from other large hominids, to know what facial expressions mean in social context.  In fact our reactions to facial expressions are so fundamental that they occur in the parts of the brain we share with many ancestors, even non-mammals.  Just as we jump even before we know what that snake-like thing on the path really is, we react to the emotional message we’re receiving from a face before we can process and review the reaction. 

            Then, when we process, we usually go for the most commonly experienced explanation. (“When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”)  Why would this person be angry?  Have I done something?  Are they dangerous? Why do they look distressed?  Has something bad happened? What a pleasant half-smile; I imagine they’re a nice person.  Some of those who commented on the article complained that they were told to be more cheerful, others that they were asked if there’s anything wrong. So it's not just a case of demanding a behavior, but sometimes of offering help.

            In fact, we not only decide about others on the basis of their expressions, we often use their expressions to persuade others to share our view.  Look at any newspaper doing an article on a politician.  If the accompanying photo was shot at a neutral time, not at a moment of pleasure or dismay (e.g. winning an election or receiving news of a terrorist attack), its easy to tell where the paper lies on the political spectrum: if John Boehner is frowning or Chris Christie is raging, it’s left-leaning; if they’re smiling, it’s right-leaning.  Just flip the left-right for photos of Obama or Hilary Clinton (If there’s balance, that says something about the publication’s integrity.)

            Imagine an analogous situation.  Someone you know says “People coming toward me often look away abruptly or even veer from my path.”  You reply, “Well, I’ve noticed that when you walk, you often clench your fists.”  "But that doesn’t mean anything.  Its just the way I walk when I’m thinking.”  Our hands and  our faces need to be open in greeting if we want our fellow homo sapiens to feel comfortable around us.

            It may be true that some faces are structurally more friendly-seeming than others.  But do you know of anyone without a birth defect or an injury to the face who cannot smile?  The studies of Paul Ekman and others show that when people practice positive faces they experience positive moods, and vice versa, event when the are acting as test subjects, without any emotional stimulation.  I was once speaking to a Buddhist (Buddhists are mentioned in the article as among the great smilers.) and quoted the proverb, perhaps first stated by Abraham Lincoln: “Every man over 40 is responsible for his own face.”  The Buddhist agreed.  Those whose faces, in repose, are nearer to smiling than to frowning suggest to everyone they meet “I am enjoying life, I hope you are too.”  Try it; you’ll like it and so will they.