Taking selfies (a.k.a. a good photo of yourself that will pass your standards) can be quite a challenge. It requires a lot of things: good lighting, a picture-perfect smile, and your "good side"—yup, you read that right. There's even a study that presents an argument as to why most of us prefer our "good side" when we're taking photos of ourselves.
Annukka Lindell, a neuropsychologist at La Trobe University in Melbourne, studied 2,000 selfies on Instagram via the hashtag #selfie. What she found was that 41% of the people in the photos showed their left side, 32% preferred their right side, and 8% didn’t show any bias when it comes to their poses. (via Refinery29.com)
The reason for our left-cheek bias when posing? It has something to do with how our brains were created.
IMAGE Giphy.com
"Because the left side of the face is predominantly controlled by the emotion-dominant right hemisphere [of the brain], the left cheek is more emotionally expressive. Consequently, people intuitively offer the left cheek when asked to pose for a photo expressing emotion, and the right cheek when posing for a photo that conceals emotion," she wrote in the study published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal.
How interesting! Now that explains why we tend to flaunt our left cheek whenever we take a selfie.
*This story originally appeared on Candymag.com. Minor edits have been made by the Preview.ph editors.
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