Brains See :-) As a Smiley Face    [21-03-2014] What does :-) mean? It shows happiness. We call the symbol an “emoticon,” a compound word formed from the words “emotion” and “icon.” We use various kinds of emoticons to show how we feel. Recently, an interesting report was published about them. Dr. Owen Churches, from Flinders University in Australia, showed 20 participants photos of real faces and emoticons, respectively. Then, he scanned their brains to observe activity in a specific part of the brain such as the occipitotemporal cortex. As a result, surprisingly, he found that the same reaction occurred in both tests! It means that human brains have developed to read emoticons in the same way as real facial expressions. According to Dr. Churches, people would not recognize the emoticons as real faces before 1982 when emoticons were not in existence. He said that this is a “culturally-created neural response.” Moreover, the tests showed that emoticons are processed according to the familiar configuration. For example, the participants’ brains reacted only when they saw the left-to-right format of an emoticon, such as :-). When the emoticon was inverted, like (-:, there was no such reaction in their brains. Young Kim Staff reporter (youngkim@timescore.co.kr)     출처: 어린이 영자신문 키즈타임즈 (www.kidstimes.net)