Can dogs read your emotions?

Dogs are awesome. No one can argue otherwise to a dedicated dog lover. They are lovable, happy, cuddly creatures that can make any house feel like a home. So what if I told you, in addition to their overall greatness, they also posses the ability to know how you are feeling? Being able to perceive emotional expressions is a useful ability for animals to understand social intentions or the motivations of other animals (Albuquerque et al., 2016). This perception is typical within species. But research has indicated that dogs can do this not only with other dogs but also humans.

A study conducted by Albuquerque et al (2016) tested the hypothesis that dogs can extract and integrate emotional information from visual and auditory inputs. Seventeen adult dogs of various breeds were presented with images of either human or dog faces depicting different expressions (happy/playful versus angry/aggressive). These images were also accompanied by a vocal sound, either a dog bark or a human voice. The sounds were alternated between being negative (aggressive), positive (happy) or neutral (calm). Unfamiliar individuals and an unfamiliar language were used to make sure familiarity or previous experience would not influence the results. The researchers proposed that if dogs can cross-modally recognize emotions, then they should look longer at facial expressions matching related emotional vocalizations. That is, a dog should look at an aggressive face with an aggressive sound longer as opposed to an aggressive face and a happy sound. They also tested to see if gender and position of the face would have any affect on results. The researchers found that the dogs showed a clear preference for the congruent face in 67% of the trials. Moreover, they found a consistent congruent looking preference regardless of the species. The results showed that domestic dogs can obtain human emotional information from both auditory and visual inputs. It also showed that they could construct a logical perception of emotion with the emotional information obtained.

So, why is this important? Well this study showed that this ability for emotional processing from unfamiliar stimuli demonstrates cognitive abilities that has not been seen in any other animal beyond humans. It also indicates that dogs obtained this ability in order to better maintain relationships with humans. This further proves that dogs are not only great, but also dedicated companions.