Bruno Nicola, Bertamini Marco, Protti Federica
Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Università di Parma, Parma, Italy.
School of Psychology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2015 Apr 27;10(4):e0124999. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0124999. eCollection 2015.
Self-portraits are more likely to show the artist's right than left cheek. This phenomenon may have a psychobiological basis: Self-portraitists often copy their subject from mirrors and, if they prefer to present their left cheek (more expressive due to right-lateralization of emotions) to the mirror, this would result in a right-cheek bias in the painting. We tested this hypothesis using SelfieCity (3200 selfies posted on Instagram from December 4 through 12, 2013 from New York, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Moskow, and Bangkok), which includes two selfie-taking styles: a "standard" (photograph of selfie-taker) and a "mirror" (photograph of mirror reflection of selfie-taker) style. We show that the first style reveals a left cheek bias, whereas the second reveals a right cheek bias. Thus side biases observed in a world-wide, large, and ecologically valid database of naïve self-portraits provide strong support for a role of psychobiological factors in the artistic composition of self-portraits.
自画像中更有可能展现艺术家的右脸颊而非左脸颊。这种现象可能有心理生物学基础：自画像画家常常从镜子中临摹自己的形象，如果他们更倾向于将左脸颊（由于情绪右偏侧化而更具表现力）朝向镜子，那么这会导致画作中出现右脸颊偏向。我们使用“自拍之城”（2013年12月4日至12日在Instagram上发布的来自纽约、圣保罗、柏林、莫斯科和曼谷的3200张自拍）来检验这一假设，其中包括两种自拍风格：“标准”（自拍者的照片）和“镜像”（自拍者在镜子中的反射照片）风格。我们发现，第一种风格呈现出左脸颊偏向，而第二种则呈现出右脸颊偏向。因此，在一个全球范围、规模庞大且具有生态效度的自然自画像数据库中观察到的左右偏向，为心理生物学因素在自画像艺术构图中的作用提供了有力支持。
