People who frequently take selfies are potential psychopaths

If you are a man and you imitate Justin Bieber regularly by posting pictures of yourself on social networking sites like Facebook or Instagram, we have some disturbing news for you: you are at high risk of antisocial mental disorders.

A new study conducted by Ohio State University associate professor Jesse Fox and Ohio State University doctoral student Margaret Rooney shows that men who regularly post pictures of themselves on the Internet are much more likely to be narcissistic and psychopathic. from the other men.

In addition, people who usually edit their selfie before uploading it to the social network, that is, use various image enhancement programs such as Photoshop, have very high indicators of narcissism and psychopathic symptoms, which are detected using a special rock.

“We got completely logical results in our research: people who take a lot of selfies and spend too much time improving them are more narcissistic.

However, despite the evidence, our study is the first scientific evidence of this symptom of psychopathy, previously this relationship has not been studied scientifically. >

“More interesting is not the fact that the selfie is related to narcissism, but the relationship between the selfie and other antisocial personality traits – psychopathy and a tendency to self-objectify.”

Narcissism is the belief that a person is smarter, more attractive and generally better than everyone else, combined with inner self-doubt in their own capabilities.

And psychopathy is defined as a lack of empathy and respect for other people combined with a tendency toward impulsive behavior. Self-objectification is a term used to denote the condition in which a person pays too much attention to the details of one’s own appearance, while ignoring one’s positive qualities.

In the study conducted by scientists from Ohio State University, USA, 800 men aged 18 to 40 took part, who filled out an online questionnaire in which they were asked questions about their style of communication in social networks, and also underwent a standard survey, the purpose of which was to establish the signs of antisocial behavior and self-objectification.

Initially, women also participated in the study, but the obtained results were rejected due to gross violations in the methodology.

The men were asked how often they post a selfie, whether they enhance their photography before uploading it to the Internet, and what this editing involves – just removing the excess fields or using special software for detailed editing of the respective photo.

The results of this study were published in the online version of the journal Personality and Individual Differences. The authors emphasize that posting a large number of selfies is associated with narcissism and psychopathy, but psychopathy is not necessarily manifested by uploading selfies to the social network.

Fox points out that the emphasis on editing one’s own photos before posting is more typical of people with self-objectification, which is not uncommon among heterosexual men.

At the same time, it is more characteristic of psychopathy to upload a large number of selfies without any editing, because these people are impulsive and they never waste time improving certain photographs.

“Self-objectification is known to provoke a number of serious problems, the main ones being depression and eating disorders,” Fox added.