Instagram filters can help diagnose depression, research says

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Instagram may be best known for users' pictures of avocado toast, fashionable outfits and inspirational quotes.

But if your friend is posting frequently on Instagram in darker colours, they may be exhibiting signs of depression, according to a new paper.

Researchers Andrew Reece of Harvard University and Chris Danforth of the University of Vermont analysed close to 44,000 Instagram photos from 166 volunteers - recruited through an Amazon service called MTurk - to identify what constitutes an Instagram-coded call for help.

They discovered a correlation between mood and colour by looking at hue, saturation and brightness of photographs.

“In studies associating mood, colour, and mental health, healthy individuals identified darker, greyer colours with negative mood, and generally preferred brighter, more vivid colours,” the researchers wrote.

“By contrast, depressed individuals were found to prefer darker, greyer colours.”

“Inkwell”, which turns colour photos to black and white, was the most commonly used filter among depressed participants.

They were more likely to post on Instagram more frequently and upload pictures which included faces, albeit a smaller number of faces in each picture, indicating that they may “interact in smaller social settings”, the research found.

The fewer likes and comments on a post, the less engagement a participant enjoys and can also indicate depression.

“These findings suggest new avenues for early screening and detection of mental illness,” the researchers wrote.

The report is available on arXiv, a site associated with Cornell University that shows research before it is published, and has yet to be independently reviewed.

Participants completed a clinical depression survey, shared information about their social media like usernames, as well as report any history of depression diagnosis.

The research comes just two months after Microsoft scientists demonstrated that by analysing a large number of search engine queries they could detect users likely to be suffering from pancreatic cancer - before they had even been diagnosed.