According to a study that was published in EPJ Data Science, there's a link between how you tailor your Instagram photos and depression. That conclusion was reached after researchers conducted the very mundane task of collecting data from the IG's of 166 people, sorting through nearly 44,000 pictures in the process. One can only wonder just how many of those were food, people misusing gym equipment, selfies, and other miscellaneous activities.
What they found was that healthy people preferred brighter colors when editing their photos, but that they used darker colors to illustrate bad moods. In contrast, they found that depressed people had a preference for darker/grayer hues without regards to the mood they were trying to convey.
On top of that, they also reasoned that healthy people often used the Valencia filter, which makes colors more prominent. In contrast, depressed people frequently used the colorless, black-and-white Inkwell filter. "In other words," the study concluded, "people suffering from depression were more likely to favor a filter that literally drained all the color out the images they wanted to share." Additionally, it was also noted that depressed people are more likely to post less.
All that stuff kind of adds up now that we think about it.
But, in an interesting twist, it turns out that people are so transparent with their usage of social media that the researchers for this particular experiment had a stronger ability to diagnose depression than the average general practitioners' success rate. Those same researchers believe their findings could lead to more effective and inexpensive diagnostic techniques. Or, as they put it, "this computational approach, requiring only patients’ digital consent to share their social media histories, may open avenues to care which are currently difficult or impossible to provide."
You can read the whole study here.
