Study shows dogs can tell happy, fearful and sad faces apart
University of Vienna researchers discovered that dogs can differentiate between human emotions such as happiness, fear and sadness from facial expressions alone, even when the people are strangers.
A research team at the University of Vienna conditioned nine Border Collies, three Golden Retrievers, a Labrador and a mixed-breed dog to remain still inside a magnetic-resonance scanner for ten minutes. While the dogs were immobilized, the investigators showed them images of strangers expressing happiness, fear, anger or sadness. Functional imaging showed that happy faces lit up the dogs’ nucleus caudatus, a brain region associated with reward, suggesting that positive human expressions may be perceived as rewarding.
In contrast, fearful faces activated neural circuits distinct from those engaged by angry or sad faces, demonstrating nuanced discrimination of negative emotions. Lead author Raúl Hernández-Pérez and co-author Laura Cuaya interpret the findings as evidence that domestication endowed dogs with advanced social cognition needed to understand and cooperate with humans. The results were published in the journal iScience and complement earlier British work linking human emotions to dogs’ own affective states.
Why it matters
Understanding dogs' ability to read nuanced human emotions can improve training, therapy work, and human-animal relationships.
In this story
