What your selfie says about you

Poses, locations and angles of our selfies reveal a lot about our personality, psychologists say. Photo / 123RF

If a picture paints a thousand words, then what might a selfie say about you?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

The pose, the location and even the angle from which we take a picture of ourselves reveal a lot about our personality, psychologists say.

Researchers looked at four personality traits of 600 volunteers, then matched them against photographs they had taken of themselves.

The team used a questionaire to judge the agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness of the guinea pigs before looking for clues to these traits in their profile pictures on Weibo - a social networking site known as "the Chinese Twitter".

One of the tell-tale signs for neuroticism or moodiness is what they call "duck face" - a sort of exaggerated pout.

Other cues included the background location, with those who choose a public spot such as a park or the beach to snap themselves more likely to be conscientious or dependable.

Writing in the journal Computers In Human Behaviour, the researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore added that those who hold the camera up high are less likely to be nice, or agreeable, while those who smiled were generally more open and warm.

They said: "Selfies give individuals more freedom of controlling their face visibility, emotional expression, and camera position."

- Daily Mail