Brain Activity while Reading Sentences with Kanji Characters Expressing Emotions

—An fMRI Study on Kanji Characters Expressing “Laughter” and “Tears”—

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the brain activity associated with kanji characters expressing emotion, which are places at the end of a sentence. Japanese people use a special kanji character in brackets at the end of sentences in text messages such as those sent through e-mail and messenger tools. Such kanji characters plays a role to expresses the sender's emotion (such as fun, laughter, sadness, tears), like emoticons. It is a very simple and effective way to convey the senders' emotions and his/her thoughts to the receiver. In this research, we investigate the effects of emotional kanji characters by using an fMRI study. The experimental results show that both the right and left inferior frontal gyrus, which have been implicated on verbal and nonverbal information, were activated. We found that we detect a sentence with an emotional kanji character as the verbal and nonverval information, and a sentence with emotional kanji characters enrich communication between the sender and the reciever.