We’ve all been there, posing for a quick selfie on a night out, only for this ‘quick selfie’ to swiftly descend into a full-blown photo shoot as no angle seems quite right. But one psychology paper has suggested that there may actually be a ‘correct’ angle for us to take a picture from.
Of course, anyone who has a lot of pictures taken of them will have a good idea of how they look best when having their picture taken. No-one wants to be surprised by a photographer and show up flaunting a strained grimace in place of a smile. But let’s assume that you get adequate warning and manage to not look like a startled possum in the picture, there is still an objective ‘best side’ according to this study.
Not only that, but it’s not even based on the idiosyncratic face shape of the person in the picture.
In a strange but fascinating idea, the study proposes that the way that our brains are structured could affect how we perceive the different sides of our face. Specifically, the theory suggests that the left side of our face is the ‘right’ side to preference when taking a selfie. Is that clear? The left side is the right side, right?
The study, which was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, first noted that the majority of people seemed to have a bias for adopting a preferred pose. The theory was put forward by Annukka Lindell, a senior lecturer in experimental neuropsychology at La Trobe University in Melbourne. It consisted of Lindell examining 2,000 selfies to find out which side of the face featured more.
The study found that the pictures showed ‘left cheek bias’ 41 percent of the time, 31.5 percent on a ‘right cheek bias’, an overall ‘midline bias’ at 19.5 percent, and ‘no overall bias’ at 8 percent. Lindell wrote: “Given that only 8 percent of selfie-takers showed no overall bias, the tendency to repeatedly adopt a preferred pose appears to be the norm for selfie takers.”
One explanation could be that the left side of the face is more connected to the right hemisphere in the brain, which covers emotions. In layperson’s terms, this means that the left side exhibits emotions more ‘fully’, the theory proposes. If the theory is correct, then it seems there may actually be an objective answer to which is our ‘best side’.