Exploration of the Relationships Among Narcissism, Life Satisfaction, and Loneliness of Instagram Users and the High- and Low-Level Features of Their Photographs.

Yunhwan Kim,Dongyan Nan,Jang Hyun Kim

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.707074

Yunhwan Kim, Dongyan Nan + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.707074

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Abstract

We examined the associations between the characteristics of Instagram users and the features of their photographs. Narcissism, life satisfaction, and loneliness were employed for user variables and the features at high- (content) and low-levels (pixel) were employed to analyze the Instagram photographs. An online survey was conducted with 179 university students, and their Instagram photographs, 25,394 in total, were collected and analyzed. High-level features were extracted using Computer Vision and Emotion Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, and low-level features were extracted utilizing the program written by the authors. The results of correlation analysis indicate that narcissism, life satisfaction, and loneliness were significantly associated with a part of photograph features at high- and low-levels. The results of the predictive analysis suggest that narcissism, loneliness in total, and social loneliness could be predicted with acceptable accuracy from Instagram photograph features, while characteristics such as life satisfaction, family loneliness, and romantic loneliness could not be predicted. Implications of this research and suggestions for further research were presented.

Highlights

Self-expression is one of the key behaviors concerning the use of social networking sites (SNSs)
We investigated the relationships between the characteristics of Instagram users, narcissism, life satisfaction, and loneliness, and the features of their photographs at high- and Narcissism Life satisfaction Loneliness Family loneliness Social loneliness Romantic loneliness
The results of this study suggested that the content, not the number, of Instagram photographs is one of the key indicators of narcissism of the users

Summary

Introduction

Self-expression is one of the key behaviors concerning the use of social networking sites (SNSs). Despite the variety of relationships, the actual behaviors of users mainly consist of self-expression (Kim and Dindia, 2011; Taddei and Contena, 2013). The initialization of a relationship, asking for being friends (e.g., on Facebook) or following (e.g., on Instagram and Twitter), can be regarded as expressing the presence of and basic information about oneself (Barak and Gluck-Ofri, 2007). Liking or commenting on the posts of other users can be considered as expressing their preference. The uploading of new posts, one of the Instagram Users and Photo Features most active online behaviors, can be active self-expression (Orben and Dunbar, 2017) in that users can choose the topic of posts, content, and uploading time which reveals the explicitly and implicitly of the user

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