Human brain reacts to emoticons as real faces

Just a few decades after they were invented, emoticons have become an indispensable part of online communication - so much so that the human brain now reacts to them in the same way as a real face.

Emoticons such as :-) have become so important to how we communicate online that they are changing the way that our brains work. They are used to provide clues to the tone of SMS, emails and tweets that can be hard to briefly describe in words alone. But Dr Owen Churches, from the school of psychology at Flinders University in Adelaide, has found that they have become so important that we now react to them in the same way as we would to a real human face.

When we see a face there is a very specific reaction in certain parts of the brain such as the occipitotemporal cortex. When that image of a face is inverted there is another very specific reaction. This can be tracked using advanced brain scanning techniques. Churches found that the same reaction occurred when 20 participants in a study were shown emoticons, but only when they were viewed in the traditional, left-to-right format. When they were "inverted", or flipped to be read right-to-left, the expected reaction was not found.

This showed that humans have now developed to read :-) in the same way as a human face, but do not have the same connection with (-:. The study, published in the Social Neuroscience journal, also included participants being shown real faces and meaningless strings of characters as controls.

"Emoticons are a new form of language that we're producing, and to decode that language we've produced a new pattern of brain activity," Churches said. “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. This is an entirely culturally-created neural response. It's really quite amazing."

Question 1 (2 points) Indicate whether the following statements are true or false and write down which part of the text justifies your answer.

a. People have been using emoticons for ten years.

b. Emoticons convey the meaning of messages quicker than words.

c. Every time we see an image of a face our brain reacts in the same way.

d. Our brain has developed a new neural response.

Question 2 (2 points) Answer the following questions in your own words.

a. What effect have emoticons had on our brains?

b. Who carried out the study and how did he do it?

Question 3 (1.5 points) Find words or phrases in the text that correspond in meaning to the words and definitions given.

a. essential (par.1)                   b. turned  (par.3)                                   c. magazine (par.4)

d. method, system (par.5)        e. from birth (par.5)

Question 4 (1.5 points) Complete the following sentences without changing the meaning.

a. Emoticons are so important in online communication that our brain knows how to decode them.

            If  emoticons …….

b. Emoticons are changing the way our brains work.

            The way ……..

c. “I’ve found that they have become so important that we now react to them in the same way as we would to a real face”.

           Dr. Churches said that ………...

Question 5 (3 points) Write a short essay (120-150 words) on the following topic:

How do you prefer to communicate and why?