I came across an article on Wired called “The Human Brain Now Reacts to Emoticons Like Real Faces“. It’s a good, short read that is nicely summed up in the title. For a while now I’ve been drawn to the idea that technology is not neutral, despite what many people claim. This seems to be more proof that it isn’t.
However, I’m always suspicious of popular media’s reporting of research studies, so I decided to track down the original research article. Thankfully, I saw that I could read the article, “Emoticons in mind: An event-related potential study” online through my university. I pulled out my alum library card, logged in, and got into an interesting read.
The Wired article is actually fairly accurate. The researchers did use only the happy face emoticon, and they did conclude that because the participants’ brains reacted to the :) as a face as opposed to (: that the recognition of an emoticon as a face is a learned behaviour. If it were a natural behaviour, the brain would have reacted similarly to both directions of the emoticon.
I was curious about the participants’ ages, though. Were they from a range of ages, or were they from younger generations. It turned out that there were 20 people aged 18-32, so the study contained a small number of participants from the generations that have grown up surrounded by computers and the internet.
I wonder how much exposure to emoticons it takes until the brain reacts to them as it would to a face. And I wonder how the brain reacts to the less recognizable emoticons, the ones that look like a face but don’t have an emotion that is understood by the participant.
All in all, I spent a lot more time on this article that I thought I would and wouldn’t mind knowing more if and when any follow-up studies are done.
Doors Marked Pull 