Is your profile photo bright and cheery, or is it a brooding work of social media art?

 

你的头像照片明亮愉快吗？抑或是社交媒体艺术孕育的成果？

 

According to a new study, these distinctions contain key clues about your personality and can reveal whether you’re conscientious¹, extraverted, or even neurotic².

 

Using thousands of Twitter profile pictures, an international team of researchers found that personality traits can be accurately³ predicted based on differences in aesthetic⁴ and facial presentation.

 

Twitter users that have a profile picture with higher aesthetic quality - increased contrast, sharpness, saturation⁵, less blur⁶ - were associated with open personalities⁷, the team found.

 

This group was also most likely to have a profile picture that contained something other than a face, indicating 'non-conformance,' they explain.

 

But, they were also less colourful, and the facial expressions were higher in negative emotion, particularly anger.

 

As for conscientious users, the researchers found profile pictures were more colourful, natural, and bright.

 

These users were highly correlated with positive mood expressions, like smiling, and expressed the most emotions out of all the five traits.

 

Extraverts were found to have the most colourful images, and tended to have profile pictures that contain multiple people.

 

Users associated with agreeableness were also found to have colourful photos, which were blurry⁸ and bright.

 

Overall, these users express positive emotions.

 

Neurotic users, they found, tended to have simpler, uncolourful images.

 

They were also more likely to opt⁹ not to present a face in their photos, and had an overall lack of positive emotions when a face was shown.

 

Using this information, researchers say profile pictures can be harnessed to make predictions with 'robust¹⁰ accuracy.'

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