Researchers published the results of their study on 10 August in the journal iScience, revealing that dogs' brains respond differently to human expressions of happiness, anger, fear and sadness. The study provides new insights into the cognitive abilities of dogs and how they perceive the emotional states of their owners.
To reach these conclusions, researchers recorded the brain activity of dogs while they were shown photographs of people with different emotions. The results showed that the dogs' brain responses varied significantly depending on the facial expression in the photographs, indicating a high level of perception.
The findings confirm that dogs do not categorise human faces simply into positive and negative categories. Instead, they perform a more complex analysis, processing each emotion in a specific way. This is the first evidence that dogs distinguish specific negative expressions, rather than treating them as a homogeneous group.
In particular, the distinction between fear and other negative emotions such as anger and sadness is highlighted. While viewing fearful faces, dogs exhibited specific patterns of brain activity that were not present when viewing angry or sad faces. These unique neural responses suggest that dogs can detect subtle differences between different types of negative emotions in humans.
