Have you ever thought that your dog is on the same wavelength with you? Perhaps you are not far from the truth.
In new experiments, dogs showed signs of knowing whether a person or a dog was cheerful or angry, based on facial expressions and sounds.
The study, published in the journal Biology Letters, aims to examine the emotional connection between a person and their best friend. For the study, Natalia de Souza Albuquerque of the University of São Paulo in Brazil and her colleagues used 17 domestic dogs from Lincoln in England. The man's friends went through two rounds of experiments.
During the first trials, each dog was placed in front of two screens. The animal was shown a photograph of a dog or person with a cheerful or sad expression on the muzzle or face. Then the pictures were accompanied by a variety of sounds - playful or aggressive barking for dogs and a phrase in an unfamiliar language (Brazilian Portuguese), pronounced in a cheerful or angry tone for people.
When dogs were shown additional photographs of dogs and people accompanied by sounds - say, a dog with a happy expression on its face along with a playful bark - the dogs stared at the screens longer than when the expression did not match the sound. Their attention indicated that the dogs were recognizing emotions.
On the other hand, when dogs heard a neutral sound, the animals lost interest in the photographs, looking at the room instead of the screen - an indicator that the dogs correctly discerned the absence of emotion.
According to Albuquerque, the ability of dogs to connect emotionally with humans and dogs is not instinct or learned behavior, but cognitive ability. “Dogs had to extract information from sound and then associate that information with images, and this requires very complex psychological mechanisms,” she says.
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Surprisingly, the team found that dogs are better at distinguishing the emotions of their fellows than humans.
Humans and dogs have lived side by side for about 30,000 years, and evolution seems to have developed dogs' ability to read the emotions of their owners.