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The science behind emojis/Here's how the brain reads digital emotions

2026-05-18 07:28:00, Kuriozitete CNA

The science behind emojis/Here's how the brain reads digital emotions

A smiling emoji on a screen hardly compares to a real human smile.

However, modern research shows that the brain does not process them as differently as one might expect. In the first milliseconds, the neural responses elicited by a face and a simple icon are surprisingly similar.

According to the study published in the journal Psychophysiology, recognizing emotions is a fundamental human ability, essential for social interaction. The brain has evolved to process faces extremely quickly, activating specialized networks within fractions of a second.

Simply put, the brain "recognizes" an emoji as if it were a face, at least in the early stages of processing.

An interesting finding is that emojis often produce even clearer signals in the brain than real faces. The reason seems to be the simplicity and exaggeration of their features: big smiles, strong expressions, and clean lines.

In contrast, human faces are more complex and vary from person to person, which makes some emotions more difficult to discern.

For example, the brain easily distinguishes between a happy face and a neutral one, but has more difficulty distinguishing between two negative emotions, such as anger and sadness, whether expressed by a human or an emoji./CNA 





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