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What your profile picture REALLY says about you: Experts say they can reveal if you are conscientious, artistic or neurotic

Pictures with high aesthetic quality were associated with open personality
Open and neurotic users most likely to use photo that doesn't show face
Conscientious, agreeable, or extraverted typically show at least one face
These users also were more likely to express positive emotions in image

Published: 19:40 GMT, 23 May 2016 | Updated: 00:00 GMT, 24 May 2016

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

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

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

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. An example is pictured above, posed by a model

WHAT THE STUDY FOUND

Each personality trait has a specific type of profile picture.

Profile pictures with higher aesthetic quality – increased contrast, sharpness, saturation, less blur – were associated with open personalities, the team found.

Users that are either high in openness or neuroticism were more likely to have photos that don't show any faces.

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

Conscientious users have profile pictures that are more colourful, natural, and bright.

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 blurry and bright.

In a recent paper, Analyzing Personality through Social Media Profile Picture Choice, researchers analysed a data set of more than 66,000 Twitter users, and collected up to 3,200 of the most recent tweets for each person.

Along with this, 434 Twitter users were given a psychological survey to determine their scores among the Big Five personality traits.

These include extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience.

Profile pictures are likely an important indicator of personality, as they are chosen by the user to represent their online persona, the researchers explain.

So, they looked only at profile photos, and divided the features into two categories: general image features and stylistic facial features.

The researchers analysed the differences in colour, composition, general type (meaning number of faces included), demographics, facial presentation, and expression.

Then, they investigated the correlation between the personality analyses and the features of each image.

Twitter users that have a profile picture with higher aesthetic quality – increased contrast, sharpness, saturation, less blur – were associated with open personalities, the team found. An example is pictured left. Neurotic users tended to have simpler, uncolourful images. An example is pictured on right, posed by a model

Twitter users that have a profile picture with higher aesthetic quality – increased contrast, sharpness, saturation, less blur – were associated with open personalities, 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.

The researchers analysed the differences in colour, composition, general type (meaning number of faces included), demographics, facial presentation, and expression. They looked at the basic emotions conveyed, including anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise, pictured above

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 blurry and bright.

Extraverts were found to have the most colourful images, and tended to have profile pictures that contain multiple people. An example is shown left, posed by models. Users associated with agreeableness were also found to have colourful photos, which were blurry and bright. A stock photo exemplifying this is shown on right

Overall, these users express positive emotions.

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

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

The researchers say these findings line up with psychological research, and reveal how each people of personality trait tend to represent themselves online.

‘In general, when examining facial emotion correlation patterns, we highlight two well aligned clusters: openness and neuroticism in one, and conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness in the other,’ they wrote.

Using this information, they say profile pictures can be harnessed to make predictions with ‘robust accuracy.’