Every dog lover will tell you that dogs can decipher their owner’s emotions. But did you know it’s actually been proven by science? In a study which appears in Current Biology, it has been confirmed that dogs can tell when people are happy or angry by the facial expressions they make.
To reach this conclusion, researchers put a group of dogs through a series of tests. First of all, the canines were made to look at the pictures of 15 different faces. The pictures were cut in half allowing the dogs to see only the eyes or only the mouth at any particular time. Half the dogs were given a treat when they recognised the happy faces and the other half were given a treat for recognising the angry face. Thus, the dogs, were trained in recognising the facial expressions.
After this, the dogs were made to look at a new set of faces so they couldn’t rely on what they had learnt about the people they had seen in the training. After they looked at the face the canines made their decision of either a happy or sad face by pressing their nose to a touch screen.
Although it could be argued that the dogs may choose the correct expression by coincidence, the statistics add up in favour of our four-legged friends. As proof, throughout the second round of testing, 70 out of 100 faces were correctly identified.
Ludwig Huber, co-author of the paper, and researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna’s Messerli Research Institute explained in a press release,
“”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.”
The dogs also seemed better at identifying the happy faces. These results lead the researchers to think that dogs understand the meaning behind each expression.
“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,” Huber says.
It was concluded by the researchers that dogs were able to utilise their training and memories of emotional human faces to accomplish the task and thus make the correct decisions. Therefore, this study also shows that once a dog has learned what an angry owner looks like, the canine can use that knowledge to identify the emotion in a stranger.
So next time you look at your dog, make sure you choose your facial expression wisely.