The smiley and sad emoticons first appeared in 1982
The use of emoticons, representations of the human face such as the smiling :-), is now so widespread that the brain has learned to see these images as real faces, researchers in Australia report.
The smiley and sad emoticons [ 🙂 and 🙁 respectively] first appeared in 1982, when Professor Scott Fallman proposed their use as representations of the human face to the board of trustees of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Since then, emoticons have appeared more and more frequently on the Internet and SMS.
The latest study builds on previous findings, which had shown that the human brain reacts in a characteristic way when it sees human faces.
Dr Owen Chertish and his colleagues at Flinders University in Adelaide monitored the electrical brain activity of 20 volunteers, who were asked to look at real faces, smiling emoticons or meaningless character sequences.
The analysis showed that the brain activity patterns were the same for real faces and emoticons—an indication that emoticons are perceived as real faces. Furthermore, the activity pattern changed, no longer corresponding to a real face, when the emoticon image was reversed to (-:.
In this case, the symbols cease to represent the mouth, nose, and eyes and are perceived as real symbols.
The researchers point out, however, that the brain's reaction to emoticons is not a natural reaction but something we have learned from using emoticons in recent years. The study is published in the journal Social Neuroscience.
Source: protothema.gr
