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Emoticon language is 'shaping the brain'

Emoticon brain Emoticons such as smiley faces are a new language that is changing our brain, according to new Australian research published in the journal Social Neuroscience.

Since emoticons first appeared in the 1980s, they have become an integral part of our communication, especially in text messages and emails.

"Emoticons are a new form of language that we're producing," says researcher, Dr Owen Churches, from the school of psychology at Flinders University in Adelaide, "and to decode that language we've produced a new pattern of brain activity."

According to Churches, faces are very special from a psychological point of view.

"Most of us pay more attention to faces than we do to anything else," says Churches, who has been studying the neuroscience of face perception for several years.

"We know experimentally that people respond differently to faces than they do to other object categories."

He says when we look at an image of a real face, we recognise the position of the mouth relative to the nose and the eyes, and as a result very specific parts of the brain are activated.

When this image is inverted, we get another specific pattern of brain activity.

Churches wanted to find out if the same applied when we looked at a smiley face emoticon, which is a stylised representation of a smiling human face.

Electrophysiology study

Churches and colleagues presented 20 participants with 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 stimuli, and also studied what happened when each stimuli was inverted.

While face-specific brain activity was triggered by the images of real faces both upright and inverted, they were only triggered by the emoticon when it was in the conventional configuration :-) .

"If that sequence is reversed with opening parenthesis, hyphen, colon (-: , areas of the brain most readily involved in face perception aren't able to process the image as a face," says Churches.

Stripped of the familiar configuration, he says, the parenthesis, hyphen and colon no longer represent mouth, nose and eyes and become just a series of punctuation marks again.

Culture shapes brain

The smiley face emoticon first appeared in a post to Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board from Professor Scott E Fahlman in 1982.

Since then, the same pattern of activity as evoked by faces has become attached to what was previously just punctuation.

"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," says Churches.

"This is an entirely culturally-created neural response. It's really quite amazing."

Student emails

Churches interest in emoticons was triggered by emails he was getting from students which regularly featured smiley faces (in the correct configuration).

"I got a large number of emails from students that went something along the lines of 'Hey, Owen, can I have an extension on that assignment?' And then they would sign off this request with a smiley face emoticon."

Just as well they typed the punctuation marks in the correct order or Churches may not have got the message.