Emoticons have become part of our culture in recent times. It started with a simple smile 🙂 and later evolved into a complex list of text emoticons that we can use to communicate our sentiments in text form. SMS was never the same since.

Studies have shown that we mind-read people every day. While communicating, we read facial expressions or emoticons and form guesses in our mind how the other person actually feel and think. It is a kind of study called thin-slicing without us being conscious of it. We then form a judgement from the result of the communication and then work through in our minds how we should react to the person we were relating to. Somehow, this mind-reading happens since we were infants as we only communicate through expressions, cries, and laughter without words. It reminded me of God reading Cain's down casted gesture when his gifts were not accepted.

In the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, the author stated that mind-reading failures happened to all of us. They lie in the root of countless arguments, disagreements, misunderstandings, and hurt feelings. We can be aware of that when we communicate with others. Bear in mind that our mind-reading mechanism may be wrong.

Knowing these facts can help us in our relationship at home, schools, church, at work or play. It frees us to relate to others and also prevents us from being misunderstood. None of us like to be studied, examined, and judged based on emoticons. All of us have bad days and many of us just wanted to be ourselves and to be accepted as who we are. Let us reprimand wrong deeds and not be upset by emoticons.

May we grow in our communications and not to dilute our conversations with mere emoticons.