  People spend considerable effort managing the impressions they give others.
Social psychologists have shown that people manage these impressions
differently depending upon their personality. Facebook and other social media
provide a new forum for this fundamental process; hence, understanding people's
behaviour on social media could provide interesting insights on their
personality. In this paper we investigate automatic personality recognition
from Facebook profile pictures. We analyze the effectiveness of four families
of visual features and we discuss some human interpretable patterns that
explain the personality traits of the individuals. For example, extroverts and
agreeable individuals tend to have warm colored pictures and to exhibit many
faces in their portraits, mirroring their inclination to socialize; while
neurotic ones have a prevalence of pictures of indoor places. Then, we propose
a classification approach to automatically recognize personality traits from
these visual features. Finally, we compare the performance of our
classification approach to the one obtained by human raters and we show that
computer-based classifications are significantly more accurate than averaged
human-based classifications for Extraversion and Neuroticism.
