You may be skeptical about this article, but it’s a good read. However, we have covered the topic with caution and suspicion regarding all the claims that appear outlandish.

Selfies are camera shots of oneself. Simple as that. Try not to go too deep in these claims, and read the article as something that offers new and interesting information.

Today’s society is too focused on physical appearance. How do Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets affect your mental health? Some comments are too hurtful and mean.

Have you ever heard of the “Dark Triad”? It consists of Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy.  Machiavellianism is manifested through unscrupulous cunning, deception, expediency and dishonesty.

Narcissism involves inordinate fascination with one-self and excessive self-love.

Psychopathy is a mental disorder in which individuals have amoral and antisocial behavior and are unable to love others or have a meaningful personal relationship. It includes extreme egocentricity and inability to learn from experience.

Selfies may be linked to narcissism and other mental issues

The results of an online survey released in the journal Personality and Individual Differences were more than shocking. It involved US men aged 18-40, social networking sites (SNSs) and selfies.

Researchers used self-objectification personality tendencies as an influence on the results of their study.

Self-objectification are sociocultural forces that involve promoting of the sexual objectification of people. In other words, individuals are judged and depersonalized with solely sexual worth. So, individuals add more value to themselves in accordance with their physical appearance.

Researchers had 1000 surveys to work on. The final sample was focused on 800 men with an average age of 29. There were 12 statements, and participants had to evaluate themselves on a 5-point Likert Scale.

Four statement items were obtained from the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (I want others to pay attention to me), four came from the Psychopathy Scale (I’m not too worried about the morality of my acts) and the final four items came from the Mach IV scale (I manipulate others to get things my way). The responses were averaged through established benchmarks for analysis.

The results

Here’s what scientists found:

-- There’s a link between an individual’s propensity to follow the “Dark Triad” and self-objectification personality characteristics in predicting men’s social networking site use.

-- Self-objectification and narcissism are related to the amount of time spent on SMSs.

-- Narcissism and self-objectification are linked to edited selfies posted on SMS.

According to the results, male participants who self-objectify spent more time on SNSs than those with lower self-objectification. Narcissists spend more time on SNSs. Narcissists and psychopaths post selfies frequently. Narcissists and individuals who self-objectify edited photos of themselves.

Scientists predict that individuals with high Dark Triad traits may employ SNSs to try “cheater strategies” to achieve their goals.

The research showed that women have much less Dark Triad characteristics than men at the expense of high self-objectification.

Sources:
www.powerofpositivity.com
www.psychologytoday.com