Taking the perfect selfie can be a laborious business, but most of think we have a "good side," according to a new study.
Annukka Lindell, a senior lecturer in experimental neuropsychology at Melbourne's La Trobe University, examined 2,000 selfies on Instagram by sifting through the #selfie hashtag.
She found that selfie-takers favoured their left side in 41% of photos - but only favoured their right side in 32% of photos. They posted selfies showing their faces dead-on-centre in 20% of photos, and shared selfies with no overall posing bias in 8% of photos.
"Ninety-two percent of the sample showed an overall posing bias," Lindell wrote in the study published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal. "Given that only 8% of selfie-takers showed no overall bias, the tendency to repeatedly adopt a preferred pose appears to be the norm for selfie-takers."
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Lindell also concluded that her study supports the idea that we have a "left-cheek bias" when posing for photos. This, she argued, is because of the way our brains are wired.
"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," she wrote. "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."
Lindell's research follows another recent study of selfie-takers, which found that they tend to fall into three categories: communicators, autobiographers, and self-promoters.