What your selfie camera angle says about you
The left bias
Since the 1970swe have known that in historical western portraiture, artists favored depicting the left cheek of their sitters, particularly when painting women. A 2017 study showed that when it comes to taking selfies,people tend to angle their smartphone in order to photograph their own left cheek too.
Patterns have also been detected in the way selfie-takers position their cameras vertically.Another 2017 studyof selfies posted on Tinder found that when looking to hook up, women most often choose to shoot their selfies from above, and men from below.
My colleagues and I looked at how this might vary on a different platform.We considered2,000 selfies posted on a random sample of 200 different Instagram accounts – ten selfies per person. For each selfie, we recorded the gender of the user as apparent from the photograph, and whether they took their selfie from above, from below or frontally. We found that all the users – regardless of gender – tended to place the camera above their heads.
These differences in camera position create different kinds of selfie. The question is why. But how do these choices relate to what the selfies are being used for, the platforms they’re posted on?
Facial expressivity
Most“how to take the best selfie” guidesemphasize that photographing your face at an angle and from above makes makes you look better.
This is borne out bya study of Tinder selfieswherein the authors determined that men taking selfies from below was, partly, out of an attempt to appear taller and therefore more masculine. Women taking selfies from above, meanwhile, was said to achieve the opposite, and make them look shorter and more feminine.
Elsewhere,researchhas looked at the early trends in selfie poses and how some were about angling and composing your face so as to look thinner and more vulnerable – which is also equated with being more attractive.
In trying to explain why a historical painter might have preferred the left side of their sitter’s face, researchersexplored several possibilities. These ranged from whether the artist was left or right-handed, where the sitter sat in relation to the painter, or whether there was, in fact, a superiority of the left visual half-field in facial recognition: in other words, might a profile painted to the left of the canvas be more easily perceived?
The data though was inconclusive on all those theories, save perhaps the possibility, the authors of the study said, of a basic visual preference. It might be, they suggested, that we simply find the left side more attractive than the right. In selfies, both left and right-handed people showed the same left-cheek bias – so here too, it’s not about handiness. Instead, this prevalence suggests that we know, instinctively, that showing our left side is the better option.
Recent evidenceprovides a clearer reason why this might be. The left side of the face is controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, which in turn is responsible forcommunicating emotions. Thus, the left side is the more emotionally expressive.
Researchers have also found that we tend to perceive ourselves asmore attractive and likable in our selfies, than in photographs other people take of us.
The degree of expressivity we go for depends on what we intend to communicate, and the platform we’re communicating on. By showing the left cheek – or shooting from above – we look more expressive. Placing the camera frontally, meanwhile, achieves a neutral look.
Selfie proxemics
Selfie-takers, in their choice of pose and other pictorial features, are providing nonverbal, social and emotional signals to their viewers. These signalscan be thought ofas the 2D equivalent of the nonverbal signals that we use in face-to-face communication.
In person, individuals control their posture and facial expressions, and how far they stand from each other, to express degrees of intimacy or avoidance. Since Edward Hall’s seminal 1960s work,The Hidden Dimension, we have called this spacing behavior or proxemics.
In selfies, as in photography orcinematography, you have only got pictorial space to play with. But this too provides a set of proxemics: the way the subject is oriented, any left-right asymmetry in the composition, questions of relative size between objects in the frame.
These variables, which are determined through the distance from the camera, and, crucially, the camera angle, contribute to non-verbally communicating the selfie-taker’s motivations, intentions, or emotional states.
This chimes with the way selfies have been defined as a form ofself-disclosure. It’s not just about someone presenting or representing themselves, pictorially, inthe way that self-portraits do(a difference which my current research is looking at), but a means of revealing personal information within a dialogue.
The throwaway nature of the selfie sets it apart from the more considered, artistic intention of a self-portrait. Likewise, the way a selfie is all about context and interaction. As writer, theoristand the person behind the Museum Selfies tumblrputs it, “selfies are shared as part of a conversation”.
This article byAlessandro Soranzo, Reader in Experimental Psychology,Sheffield Hallam University, is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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