Dogs can read human facial expressions, say researchers

Every dog owner knows that your dog can usually tell from your tone whether you are happy or not, but new research suggests that you might not have to speak at all.

According to research published in the February 12 edition of the journal Current Biology, researchers have found the first solid evidence to support the idea that dogs can read emotion in your facial expression. This, says the team, is the first solid evidence of any animal other than humans being able to read emotional expressions in another species.

“We think the dogs in our study could have solved the task only by applying their knowledge of emotional expressions in humans to the unfamiliar pictures we presented to them,” said Corsin Müller of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna in a statement.

Other attempts have been made to test this ability in dogs, but none of them have been conclusive.

For this research, dogs were trained to discriminate between pictures of happy and angry faces. During the training the dogs were shown only the upper half or the lower half of a face. After being trained on 15 different pairs of images, representing 15 individual humans the dogs were tested in four different ways.

The animals were tested using half faces, in the same way they were trained, except with new faces. They were presented with the other halves of the faces used in training, the other half of the novel faces. Finally they were presented with the left half of the faces used in training instead of the top or bottom.

According to the researchers the dogs were able to predict happy or angry faces more frequently than random chance would allow in every case. This demonstrates, say the papers authors, that dogs can not only learn to read facial expressions but can apply that knowledge to new cues using different faces or different parts of the face.

“Our study demonstrates that dogs can distinguish angry and happy expressions in humans, they can tell that these two expressions have different meanings, and they can do this not only for people they know well, but even for faces they have never seen before,” says Ludwig Huber, senior author and head of the group at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna’s Messerli Research Institute.

Huber could not say exactly what the different meanings represent to the dogs, “but it appears likely to us that the dogs associate a smiling face with a positive meaning and an angry facial expression with a negative meaning,” he said.

According to Müller and Huber, when trainers attempted to create an association between a reward and an angry face the dogs responded more slowly to the training. This suggests that the dogs already had a negative association with anger and were reluctant to shift that association.

The team plans to continue their research and investigate the role of prior experience in the dogs ability to read human emotion. They also plan to study how the dogs express emotion and how their emotions are influenced by that of the humans around them.

“We expect to gain important insights into the extraordinary bond between humans and one of their favorite pets, and into the emotional lives of animals in general,” said Müller.

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