Our mental self-portraits contain clues about our personalities

By Emma Young If I ask you to picture your face and body in your mind, what do you see? And how do your beliefs and attitudes about your self — including your personality and your self-esteem — influence these mental self-images? Completely fascinating answers to these questions have now been reported in a new paper in Psychological Science. The findings are important not just for understanding how we all see ourselves, but could also be useful for studies into body image disorders. Artistic self-portraits have long been recognised as reflecting aspects of the artist’s identity and emotions, as well as their physical self. But they’re often drawn from photographs or reflections in a mirror. How any of us really see ourselves in our mind’s eye has been very difficult to explore experimentally. To do this, Lara Maister at Bangor University and colleagues used a technique that required 77 student participants to look at 500 pairs of faces in turn and each time indicate which they felt most looked like their own. All the chosen faces were then averaged to produce a final self-portrait. The students also completed a Big Five personality test and a self-esteem scale, and had a passport-style photo taken, for comparison. The researchers used a face-recognition algorithm to analyse the self-portrait and the passport photo for each participant. This produced a measure of how different the two were. The team certainly found similarities (confirmed by human rater...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Faces Personality The self Source Type: blogs