Whether it’s an enthusiastic tail wag or a gentle nudge of the leg with their nose, it can sometimes feel like man’s best friend is truly in tune with our emotions. But surely dogs can’t understand what we’re feeling, right? Well, science might say otherwise.
A study, recently published in the journal iScience, found that not only could dogs understand our emotions, but that they can separate them into categories surprisingly well.
Animals, they found, could process happy, scared and angry emotions differently, interpreting the difference between specific negative and positive emotions.
The researchers found this out by training 12 dogs to be on their absolute best behaviour, staying completely awake during an MRI. While inside, they were shown photographs of human faces displaying happiness, anger, fear and sadness.
Each of the dogs showed a particular level of brain activity when shown the faces of happy humans. Specifically, activity occurred in their temporal cortex and caudate nucleus (areas of the brain associated with reward and motivation).
Dogs were showing strong reactions to happy faces, but what about negative ones? Using whole-brain patterns and machine learning analysis, the researchers were able to determine that dogs not only reacted differently to negative faces, but could determine differences between fearful, angry and sad reactions.
Interestingly, while there were different brain activations for interpreting between sadness and fear, and differences between anger and fear, there did not seem to be a difference between how dogs distinguished between anger and sadness.
This could suggest that dogs require more cues to differentiate between anger and sadness such as body language, situational cues or moving faces.
This isn’t the first time that scientists have analysed the emotional intelligence of animals. In the past, research had shown that they understood sad and happy reactions, but this study focused on their understanding of specific differences, using brain scans to accurately show the split in their emotional response.
Of course, only testing this on 12 dogs does mean that this research can’t be generalised to all dogs. They also likely understand emotions very differently to us so this is by no means the proof you needed that your dog understands every change in emotion that you show.
