:) :( :D :O :P >:D :$ Ö ^^ <(^_^)< <(^-^)> >(^_^)> °-° *.* -.- -____- <3 :| :3 ;X XD xd
I was just shaping your brain. I'm that badass.
A doctor from a school of psychology was receiving emails from his students where they used to include emoticons like the combination of a colon, a hyphen and a right parenthesis ":-)"and that led him to further thoughts: do we recognise emoticons the same way we identify real faces?
According to prior studies in neurosciences, when we perceive a person's face, we distinguish the relative position of the mouth to the nose and the eyes, which activates certain parts of our brain. Once the face is inverted our brain is also stimulated, although in a different manner.
So they decided to conduct an experiment to analyse the brain activities when people observe emoticons. 20 participants were shown real faces, emoticons and then meaningless strings of characters.
The interesting result: Other than it happens with real faces, there are no face-related stimuli when emoticons are stripped of their usual order, that is to say, when they inverted the traditional configuration ":-)" to "(-:" many participants' brains didn't recognise it as a face (even though I'm pretty sure they were aware that it was supposed to be a face by logical reasoning, but it is a fact that their brain didn't receive the same stimulations).
So, what does that mean? Well, since our brains only identify the emoticons directly as faces in the traditional order, we can conclude that emoticons have become a linguistic code on their own which we only read when they're used in the proper configuration. You could compare this to normal words. If I write "glob s'namreG yzarc A" you probably don't get the meaning at the very first sight. Soon you understand that you're supposed to read the line from the right to the left, you convert the code into our linguistic agreement, putting the letters in the correct order (mentally) and then you identify the message. But that's just what applies to our culture, note that Arabian languages are read from right to left. In other words, cultural influences go very deep, they even have their effects on our brains. I even remember myself having read a comment on a website which featured a "D:" and I didn't understand at first sight that it was supposed to be a negative version of the classic ":D".
All in all, I think it's a nice fun-fact, though nothing groundbreaking. Also, the news article did not specify the ages of the participants. Emoticons started appearing in the 1980's and have become especially famous thanks to the Internet. So I think it's reasonable to consider separating that experiment into different age groups. The effects that emoticons have on people of my generation who have grown up with the Internet might be different than the ones on those who have experienced the revolution of the Internet from the very beginning or the ones who lived this revolution at an advanced age.
Finally, I'd like to spread a message of optimism: Be happy, guys. There's always a reason to be happy. :)
Oh, the vocabulary... Damn, that was such a nice conclusion -.-
PS: This was post number 100! Wow, that's a lot... A shame that I won't be able to make the over 9000 joke...
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