Just because dogs don’t speak our language doesn’t mean we aren’t communicating with them in other ways. Research has shown that our canine companions can detect when we’re stressed through our scent, while another study suggests they may even shed tears of joy when reunited with their humans. Now, researchers at the University of Vienna have explored our bond with dogs even further, finding that our four-legged friends may be surprisingly skilled at reading human emotions.
Dr. Laura Cuaya, Raul Hernandez Perez, Luis Concha, Attila Andics, and Rodolfo Bernal Gamboa recently shared their findings in iScience, revealing how they used a Functional MRI (fMRI) machine to measure brain activity in dogs as they viewed images of various human expressions.
“Humans are really good at picking up small details on the face, and so are dogs,” says co-author Raúl Hernández-Pérez, PhD, of the University of Vienna. “This makes dogs very interesting. By studying their brains, we can understand what adaptations have developed to support their remarkable social and emotional understanding of humans.”
The researchers began by looking at how dogs respond to happiness, an emotion that previous studies suggest may be especially important to them. They scanned the brains of eight family dogs as they looked at photos of strangers with either happy or neutral expressions. When the dogs saw the happy faces, two areas of their brains—the temporal cortex and caudate nucleus—became more active. “The activity in the caudate nucleus is particularly interesting,” says Dr. Cuaya. “It suggests that happy human faces may have emotional significance for dogs.”
The study infers that this canine ability may have developed over thousands of years of living alongside humans. “When we compare humans with primates, we are looking at abilities that may have come from a common ancestor,” says Dr. Cuaya. “With dogs, the story is totally different. They followed a very different evolutionary path, yet through domestication, they developed the social abilities needed to understand and cooperate with us.”
The researchers pointed out that their study involved dogs from loving families, and dogs who grow up in different environments, like on the street, would likely process human emotion differently. Researchers Dr. Cuaya and Hernández-Pérez are not only colleagues but also a couple, and their own Border Collies, Odín and Kun-kun, took part in the study. The researchers first met in secondary school in Mexico and have been working together ever since, including on earlier research into how dogs understand and respond to human language and behaviour.
The researchers’ next step is to investigate how a dog’s brain signals work together to understand humans around them. They also want to explore whether people and dogs process emotional cues in similar ways, or if our brains interpret them quite differently.
“I would like people to see dogs as emotional beings,” says Dr. Cuaya. “They have evolved with us to understand our expressions and cooperate with us, and recognizing that can change how we communicate with and care for them.”
You can read the full report on iScience.
Researchers at the University of Vienna recently discovered that dogs may be surprisingly skilled at reading human emotions.
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They used a Functional MRI (fMRI) machine to measure brain activity in dogs as they viewed images of various human expressions.
Sources: Dog brain representations of human facial expressions: Encoding happiness and differentiating specific negative expressions; fMRI imaging shows dogs can distinguish between human fear and sadness
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