Emoticons are here to stay. And although today we use them every time we write a message on our mobile phone or computer, the truth is that the first was not originally included in a text until 1982, when Scott Fahlman , an engineer, programmer and professor from Carnegie Mellon University, had the idea of writing an email including the first two emoticons as we know them today: a colon, a hyphen and an open parenthesis (for the sad face), and with the closed parentheses (for the happy face).
Today we are all familiar with the smiley emoticon and its power to brighten up our text messages, chats, and emails. Even though we don’t tend to use them, we know what they mean. And to the typical emoticons that in older phones we introduced as text messages, today we have the possibility of including authentic drawings as icons.
What’s more, their use has become so widespread that, according to researchers, our brains have begun to respond to them as if they were real faces . According to a study published in 2014 in the journal Social Neuroscience , when we look at emoticons they could trigger the same facial recognition response in the occipital-temporal parts of the brain that occurs when we look at the real face of other people.
But it would not be an innate response, but a learned one . That is, it consists of a culturally created neural response , which means that our brain has adapted to react to the emoticons that we see on the mobile phone or computer screen in the same way as we would with expressions on human faces. real, which greatly surprises scholars.
Additionally, researchers have found that not all smileys are the same. The neural reaction would change significantly depending on whether or not people are looking at the more familiar version of the smiley emoticon.
For example, while the more traditional symbols ‘:)’ and ‘:-)’ did manage to activate the same face-specific mechanisms used to process real faces, non-standard symbols like ‘(-:’ did not. Researchers even believe that our brain could reject it as if it were an abomination, since the areas of the brain that participate more easily in the perception of the face are not capable of processing the image as a face.
To carry out this research a total of 20 participants were shown images of real human faces, smiley face emoticons and a series of nonsensical characters. It was found that only when the emoticons were presented in the form of common or conventional digital communication, the score was interpreted as a smiley face.
Owen Churches, Mike Nicholls, Myra Thiessen, Mark Kohler & Hannah Keage (2014) Emoticons in mind: An event-related potential study , Social Neuroscience, 9: 2, 196-202, DOI: 10.1080 / 17470919.2013.873737
