Selfie and the city: a world-wide, large, and ecologically valid database reveals a two-pronged side bias in naïve self-portraits.
Self-portraits are more likely to show the artist's right than left cheek. This phenomenon may have a psychobiological basis: Self-portraitists often copy their subject from mirrors and, if they prefer to present their left cheek (more expressive due to right-lateralization of emotions) to the mirror, this would result in a right-cheek bias in the painting. We tested this hypothesis using SelfieCity (3200 selfies posted on Instagram from December 4 through 12, 2013 from New York, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Moskow, and Bangkok), which includes two selfie-taking styles: a "standard" (photograph of selfie-taker) and a "mirror" (photograph of mirror reflection of selfie-taker) style. We show that the first style reveals a left cheek bias, whereas the second reveals a right cheek bias. Thus side biases observed in a world-wide, large, and ecologically valid database of naïve self-portraits provide strong support for a role of psychobiological factors in the artistic composition of self-portraits.
Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Università di Parma, Parma, Italy.
Nicola
N
Bruno
School of Psychology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom.
Marco
M
Bertamini
Università Suor Orsola Benincasa, Napoli, Italy.
Federica
F
Protti
D002610:Cheek; D002947:Cities; D066264:Datasets as Topic; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D010781:Photography; D011173:Portraits as Topic / Q000523:psychology*