Editorial: Understanding Selfies

Frontiers in Psychology

Nicola Bruno¹ 

关键词: selfies;    Human Computer Interaction (HCI);    internet;    social media;    facebook;    twitter;    Tinder;    smartphones;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00044

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

With the advent of smartphones and of wide-spread Internet, every day thousands of us are taking and sharing photographic self-portraits (“selfies”) for multifarious purposes. As stated by New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz (2014), selfies “have changed […] public behavior. It's become a new visual genre […] This is a very big deal for art.” In launching a research topic on selfies, we were motivated by the belief that selfies are indeed a big deal, not only for art but also for psychology. The opportunity does not come often, for a student of the human mind, to observe a brand new form of social behavior spanning issues in action, perception, cognition, personality, motivation, and social interaction. Yet, selfies have received relatively little attention by the scientific community and especially within experimental psychology. On December 1st, 2016 (before the publication of papers in this research topic), searching for the keyword “selfie” on Google yielded about 400 million hits, but only a meager 22 hits on the specialist database PubMed. We attempted to stimulate contributors by listing a series of questions that, to our minds, were worth exploring. What are the motivational, functional, and social factors driving selfie taking and posting? Are there differences between genders, age groups, ethnicities, or cultures? What biological, perceptual, cognitive, and sensorimotor factors affect selfie-taking? How might we use selfies as media tools, as sources of psychological data, or as instruments for assessing personality, stereotypes, or cultural norms? What kind of psychological object is a selfie? How does it relate to painted self-portraits, to mirror images of ourselves, and/or to our body image? Some answers to these questions are provided in this collection. The answers are partial, but interesting. It is our hope that they will stimulate further research in this area.

【 授权许可】

CC BY