They weren’t named man’s best friend for nothing – we’ve long known that dogs have an uncanny ability to understand and communicate with humans. But new research suggests that your pup may be able to read your emotions from the expression on your face.
The study, published in the journal iScience, found that not only are dogs able to identify happiness on a human face, there’s also evidence – for the first time – that dogs can distinguish negative facial expressions too.
Initially, eight participating pups had their brains scanned while looking at photographs of strangers with happy faces. The pictures made the pooches’ temporal cortex and caudate nucleus – the brain regions associated with higher cognitive and reward processing – light up.
Later, to understand how dogs differentiate between positive and negative expressions, researchers showed 12 dogs photographs of people displaying a range of emotions, including happiness, anger, fear and sadness. The temporal cortex-caudate nucleus network only responded to joyful faces.
The dogs' brains weren't just sorting things into 'good' and 'bad', but creating complex ideas that separated anger and sadness - Credit: Getty
