Use low-angle photographs on job networking sites such as LinkedIn to look powerful, research suggests.

European researchers have found that the media can influence how readers interpret the amount of power held by the subjects of photographs, just through the angle from which photographers choose to shoot.

Media pictures shot from below are seen to represent powerful people, while those shot from above are seen to represent less powerful people.

The results suggest if you want to appear powerful in your online profiles you should use a low-angle picture of yourself.

The research by Dr Steffen R. Giessner, Associate Professor at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM), and his colleagues Professor Michelle Ryan (University of Exeter, Exeter), Dr Thomas Schubert (ISCTE, Lisbon), and Dr Niels van Quaquebeke (Kuehne Logistics University, Hamburg) used the CORBIS® image database.

They also found there are more photographs of women shot from above than from below, while the opposite is true for photographs of men.

They claim that if this represents a common theme in all media, it increases a stereotypical perception that men are powerful and women are not.

Dr Giessner said: "Such simple associations of power and angle of shot do not take place in a social vacuum. Rather, context related to power (such as within organisations, or portraying the 100 most important people in the world) easily trigger our thinking about power. As a result we may consciously or unconsciously use cues to show the attribution of power in a picture."