Anyone with a dog knows the moment: you’re upset and suddenly they’re right beside you, their nose pressed against your knee as if they know exactly how you’re feeling.
New research published in the journal iScience suggests dogs may be picking up on more than we realise. The study, which examined dogs’ brain activity as they looked at different human facial expressions, found that they could not only tell a happy face from an unhappy one, but may also be able to distinguish between some negative emotions.
Inside a dog’s brain
For the study, researchers trained dogs to lie still in an MRI scanner – no small feat for any dog!
In the first experiment, eight dogs were shown photographs of strangers with either happy or neutral expressions. Happy faces prompted more activity in parts of the brain linked to higher-level thinking and reward processing.
“The activity in the caudate nucleus is particularly interesting,” explains senior study author Laura Cuaya from the University of Vienna. “It suggests that happy human faces may have emotional significance for dogs.”
In the second experiment, 12 dogs were shown faces with four expressions: happiness, anger, fear and sadness. The scans showed different patterns of brain activity when the dogs looked at sad and fearful faces, and angry and fearful faces. But when it came to anger and sadness, the difference wasn’t clear. Fear, in particular, was the one that stood out.
The researchers suggest different expressions may trigger different responses depending on the kind of threat they signal. It’s also possible dogs need more to go on, such as body language, to tell an angry face from a sad one.
Does your dog really know how you’re feeling?
Not quite – or at least, this study can’t tell us that.
The scans show dogs’ brains responded differently to certain facial expressions. They don’t prove that dogs understand what those expressions mean.
But the research does offer a peek at what is happening inside a dog’s brain while they’re watching us.
“Humans are really good at picking up small details on the face, so are dogs,” says study lead author Raúl Hernández-Pérez, also from 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.”
What about other dogs?
Before you assume your dog has you completely figured out, it’s worth noting the study was small and most of the dogs were border collies, a breed known for paying close attention to human cues.
The dogs were also looking at photographs of strangers. At home, your dog has much more to work with, from the way you move and speak to your scent. And, of course, the years spent watching your every move.
Researchers now want to explore how dogs put all of those signals together. They also hope to find out whether dogs with very different lives, including free-ranging dogs, read human cues in the same way.
There’s still plenty we don’t know but Laura hopes the findings encourage people to take dogs’ emotional lives more seriously.
“I would like people to see dogs as emotional beings,” she says. “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.”
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