Photos taken, edited, and shared to Instagram can show signs of depression through filters, faces, and colors, according to Harvard University’s Andrew Reece and Christopher Danforth from the University of Vermont. Computers trained on signals like hue, facial recognition, and saturation were also better at predicting depression than average humans who analyzed photo attributes like happiness, sadness, and likability. Surveys were assigned to depressed and healthy individuals; depressed people were asked to share their mental health history, including the date of their diagnosis. Then a computer program analyzed pictures based on the number of faces in each photo, colorization, vividness, and brightness of images to find out what image qualities apply to photos shared by depressed individuals. The “Inkwell” filter was the most common filter used by depressed participants, who were also less likely to apply filters at all, while healthy individuals favored “Valencia” and warmer tones. The study also asked participants to rank others’ photos based on four subjective elements: happiness, sadness, likability, and “interestingness.” The latter two didn’t appear to be significant indicators of depression and, predictably, depressed participants’ photos were ranked higher on the “sadness” scale. Reece and Danforth write that this could be an indiction that depressed people generally have smaller social circles. “In that sense, ‘augmenting’, rather than ‘displacing,’ might be a better way to describe the new approaches to human-computer interaction that are advancing health care.” 
 
 So perhaps in the future, a computer might analyze your mental health before you visit a doctor’s office, and once markers are recognized, a real human being can begin treatment.
– Your Instagram account may know you're depressed before you do, according to a new study out of Harvard and the University of Vermont. The Daily Dot reports researchers taught a computer to analyze aspects of Instagram photos, such as colors, brightness, and faces, then set in to analyzing nearly 44,000 posts from 166 people. The Instagram users in the study took a clinical depression survey and were asked about any history of depression, according to Fortune. CNN reports the computer program was able to correctly detect depression from a person's Instagram account 70% of the time. That's better than humans looking at Instagram photos and better than the success rate of general practitioners diagnosing depression. Researchers found the Instagram posts of depressed people tended to be less saturated, darker, and more blue. Depressed people tended to use the Inkwell filter most often (non-depressed people preferred Valencia) and got more comments on their posts (non-depressed people got more likes). Depressed people also posted more photos of faces but had fewer faces per photo. Because the computer program was able to detect depression in Instagram users before the were even diagnosed with it, researchers believe it could be a new way to screen people for depression before they start showing more serious symptoms and get them help earlier. (This party drug may soon treat depression.)