US researchers monitor mental health in Instagram images

US researchers monitor mental health in Instagram images

People with depression use the Inkwell filter and healthy ones, Valencia

   A simple photo retouching or the choice of a certain Instagram filter can reveal the emotional state of the user. This is revealed by the study of several American researchers who have found an important correlation between the colors of the photos published on Instagram and the mental health of the users.

The study by Andrew Reede and Chris Danforth reveals that users associate darker colors and grays with negative moods and colors more vivid and clear with positive states.

   Researchers from Harvard University and Vermont University hired 500 workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to carry out the investigation. Each worker was subjected to a previous clinical study, which revealed that 70% were clinically depressed.

For each healthy user, the researchers chose the 100 most recent photos. In the case of users with depression, the last 100 photos prior to diagnosis were selected.

Thanks to an automatic learning algorithm and the study of color, saturation, the number of people that appear in each image, researchers have been able to draw their conclusions from a database with more than 400,000 images.

"When depressed participants used filters, they favored very disproportionately the Inkwell filter, which converts color photographs into black and white images," write Reece and Danforth.

The study also throws a curious fact. Depressed users tend to publish selfies, although they have no scientific explanation. If so, it could be that the abundance of photos with a low count of faces published by depressed users is actually due to self-portraits.