Smiley face emoticons trigger the same pattern of electrical activity in the brain which is created when we see smiling human faces, a new study has found.
Australian researchers said that emoticons, which have become an integral part of communication in text messages and emails, are part of a new language that is changing our brain.
Dr Owen Churches, from the school of psychology at Flinders University in Adelaide, said when we look at an image of a real face, we recognise the position of the mouth relative to the nose and the eyes, and as a result very specific parts of the brain are activated.
When this image is inverted, we get another specific pattern of brain activity.
Churches decided to find out if the same applied when we looked at a smiley face emoticon.
Researchers presented 20 participants with images of real faces, smiley face emoticons (involving the use of a colon, hyphen and parenthesis), and a meaningless string of characters.
They used electrophysiology to determine the pattern of electrical activity in the brain when the participants viewed the different stimuli, and also studied what happened when each stimuli was inverted, 'ABC News' reported.
While face-specific brain activity was triggered by the images of real faces both upright and inverted, they were only triggered by the emoticon when it was in the conventional configuration.
"If that sequence is reversed with opening parenthesis, hyphen, colon, areas of the brain most readily involved in face perception aren't able to process the image as a face," said Churches.
The smiley face emoticon first appeared in a post to Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board from Professor Scott E Fahlman in 1982, 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," said Churches.
"This is an entirely culturally-created neural response. It's really quite amazing," Churches said.
The research is published in the journal Social Neuroscience.
