New research from the University of Vienna, Austria, shows that dogs can distinguish human emotions from facial expressions. The study found that dogs' brains respond differently to faces showing various emotions, marking the first evidence confirming this ability.
Researchers at the University of Vienna, Austria, used Machine Learning technology to analyze brain scans of 12 dogs as they viewed human faces showing a range of emotions including happiness, anger, fear, and sadness.
The study, published in the journal iScience by Cell Press, found that brain areas related to high-level perception and the processing of pleasurable feelings, such as the temporal cortex and the caudate nucleus, activated strongly when dogs saw smiling, happy faces of unfamiliar people.
However, when dogs viewed faces expressing anger, fear, or sadness, these two brain regions did not respond in the same way.
Nonetheless, when the research team analyzed the dogs' entire brain activity, they found distinctly different patterns corresponding to faces showing fear, anger, and sadness. This is the first evidence indicating that dogs can differentiate between various negative emotions from human facial expressions.
Senior author Laura Cuaya said that dogs have co-evolved with humans for a long time, enabling them to understand human emotional expressions and work alongside us. Understanding this ability may help change how humans communicate with and care for dogs more appropriately.
The research team plans to study how dogs integrate other signals like body language, tone of voice, and scent to interpret human emotions, and to compare how human and dog brains process emotional signals similarly or differently.
However, researchers warned that the 12 dogs participating were well-loved pets from caring families, so it is not yet possible to conclude that all dogs respond to human emotional signals in the same way, especially those raised in different environments.
. Source:channelnewsasia
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