Detecting Individuals High in Neuroticism based on the Color Features of the Facebook Profile Picture

Abstract

Previous research has mostly focused on the link between the linguistic and behavioral footprints found on social media on the one hand and personality on the other. Despite the high amount of image-based contents posted and shared online and the valuable implicit information they might conceal about users' preferences and tendencies, the study of visual traces is in its infancy. The goal of the current paper is to test whether the color characteristics of the Facebook profile picture could mirror the level of neuroticism on a sample of 508 Romanian users. For this purpose, we assessed the classification performance of four machine learning algorithms having as input three sets of visual features: (1) the colorfulness, which indicates how colorful is an image; (2) the proportion of cold colors, along with the mean and standard deviation for saturation and value; (3) the emotional load, defined as pleasure, arousal, and dominance. None of the models showed good accuracy. However, this paper contributes to the literature by being part of a line of research that requires development not only in Romania but also worldwide.