Emoticons in mind: An event-related potential study

Abstract

It is now common practice, in digital communication, to use the character combination ":-)", known as an emoticon, to indicate a smiling face. Although emoticons are readily interpreted as smiling faces, it is unclear whether emoticons trigger face-specific mechanisms or whether separate systems are utilized. A hallmark of face perception is the utilization of regions in the occipitotemporal cortex, which are sensitive to configural processing. We recorded the N170 event-related potential to investigate the way in which emoticons are perceived. Inverting faces produces a larger and later N170 while inverting objects which are perceived featurally rather than configurally reduces the amplitude of the N170. We presented 20 participants with images of upright and inverted faces, emoticons and meaningless strings of characters. Emoticons showed a large amplitude N170 when upright and a decrease in amplitude when inverted, the opposite pattern to that shown by faces. This indicates that when upright, emoticons are processed in occipitotemporal sites similarly to faces due to their familiar configuration. However, the characters which indicate the physiognomic features of emoticons are not recognized by the more laterally placed facial feature detection systems used in processing inverted faces.

The early visual encoding of a face (N170) is viewpoint-dependent: A parametric ERP-adaptation study

“…The N170 marks the first activation of a face representation in the human brain: contrary to earlier responses, it is elicited by stimuli that are perceived (i.e., interpreted) as faces, independently of their physical properties (Bentin, Sagiv, Mecklinger, Friederici, & von Cramon, 2002;Caharel et al, 2013;Churches, Nicholls, Thiessen, Kohler, & Keage, 2014;George et al, 2005; for reviews, see Rossion, 2014;. When there is no adaptation (Fig.…”

Attention to emotion through a go/no-go task in children with oppositionality and callous–unemotional traits

“…Furthermore, this kind of stimuli were considered to be more appropriate for a go/no-go task. Additionally, emoticons (when they are upright, but not lateral) are processed in occipitotemporal sites similarly to faces, due to their familiar configuration [43]. Though it can be inferred that real faces and emoticons are recognised similarly, the present study did not use real faces, and given the centrality of the amygdala to CU theories future studies should show if emoticons activate this part of the brain to the same degree as faces.…”

An application to determine the efficacy of emoji use on social marketing ads

“…As a result of the studies carried out in other disciplines related to emoji, there are findings that, such as the fact that people perceive the expressions in emojis as real human emotions and that emojis are the simplest and fastest way to express emotions (Golden, 2015) (Churches et al, 2014).…”