Emoticons such as smiley and sad faces are changing the way our brain works, Australian researchers have claimed.
They say the use of the punctuation faces trigger parts of the brain usually reserved for looking at real faces.
They believe this may be the key to their popularity – as we process them as a real face.
‘Emoticons are a new form of language that we’re producing,” says Dr Owen Churches of the school of psychology at Flinders University in Adelaide.
‘And to decode that language we’ve produced a new pattern of brain activity.’
The researchers say that we pay more attention to faces than most other things we see as we try to ‘read’ them for emotion.
The team wanted to see if this was the case with emoticons.
The team showed 20 participants images of real faces, smiley face emoticons (involving the use of a colon, hyphen and parenthesis), and a meaningless string of characters.
They used electrophysiology to determine the pattern of electrical activity in the brain when the participants viewed the different images, and found we react to emoticons in the same way.
‘There is no innate neural response to emoticons that babies are born with.
‘Before 1982 there would be no reason that ‘:-)’ would activate face sensitive areas of the cortex but now it does because we’ve learnt that this represents a face,” said Churches.
‘This is an entirely culturally-created neural response. It’s really quite amazing.’
