Our Brains Process Emoticons Like Real Faces

For better or worse, emoticons of all configurations are ubiquitous in our text-speak world and the basic smiley, :-), is recognised by pretty much everyone as a happy face. But how exactly do we interpret three punctuation marks as an expression of emotion? It’s quite remarkable that we’re able to communicate human emotions—complex even in their simplest forms—in such a compact symbol.

A team of Australian researchers looked at peoples’ neurobiological reactions to emoticons and found that their brains actually registered the smileys in the same way as they perceive real human faces.

“The frequency with which the smiley face emoticon is used suggests that it is readily and accurately perceived as a smiling face by its users,” they wrote in a paper published in the journal Social Neuroscience. “Yet the process through which this recognition takes place is unclear.”

Given the fact the components of a smiley don’t have any meaning in themselves—in most circumstances a colon isn’t a pair of eyes, a hyphen isn’t a nose, parentheses aren’t lips, and so on—they hypothesised that the smiley face must be perceived only in its emoticon configuration, much like when we recognise a real face because of how the features it’s made up of are ordered.

They showed 20 participants pictures of various emoticons and real faces, along with images of flowers and random collections of typographic characters, and measured their brain activity using EEG. Some of the faces were shown upside down, and some of the emoticons were shown “inverted,” with eyes to the right, as in the “backwards” smiley (-:

They found that when the emoticon was in its “canonical” order, with dot-eyes to the left, perception was driven by an area of the brain in the occipito-temporal cortex. In a blog post on the Conversation, lead author Owen Churches explained that this is how we also perceive regular human faces when they’re the right way round.

But there is a difference between our in-built facial recognition and our ability to perceive emoticons. When human faces are presented upside down, we recognise them using a different part of the brain, by processing the individual features we associate with a face. What’s interesting is that that doesn’t happen with “inverted” smileys, even though they arguably look as much like a face as a regular smiley—they’re just presented as rotated 90 degrees to the right instead of 90 degrees to the left. But in this arrangement, our brains don’t process the characters as a face so readily.

“This suggests that the configural processing of emoticons in their canonical orientation is based on a learnt association,” the researchers wrote. That is, we’re so used to seeing emoticons that we’ve learned to process them as faces, even though really they’re just a few taps on a keyboard. We’ve essentially taught our brains the language of emoticon. And presumably, if the first smiley had been written (-:, our brain would see that as a face and have trouble with our conventionally oriented smiley.

Now they’ve not only flooded social media but actually shaped our brains, it looks like the emoticon has well and truly solidified its place as the emotional marker for the internet age (sorry, “Emotion Markup Language”). That said, in this study the researchers only used the happy smiley—so there’s no saying how we process cool shades B-)