Have you ever thought if your dog recognize how you feel at this very moment? Can your dog know the difference between you feeling happy or sad, relaxed or worried?! Well, the answer is YES! Your dog knows according to a recent study of 17 dogs on their responses to images and sounds.
These images and sounds covered both humans and dogs and they varied between positive feelings, happy, funny and playful; to negative feelings, angry, sad, aggressive. In each certain case, the facial expression of a dog or a human was displayed at the same time as an audio clip of a bark or a voice!
"Previous studies have indicated that dogs can differentiate between human emotions from cues such as facial expressions, but this is not the same as emotional recognition," said Kun Guo from the University of Lincoln. "Our study shows that dogs have the ability to integrate two different sources of sensory information into a coherent perception of emotion in both humans and dogs. To do so requires a system of internal categorization of emotional states."
According to a report from co-author
Daniel Mills, also from
Lincoln, there is an outstanding difference between associative behavior (for example: a dog becoming sheepish in response to an angry voice) and the behavior that is exhibited in that test: realizing a range of different cues to have emotional arousal in another humans or dogs.
"Importantly, the dogs in our trials received no prior training or period of familiarization with the subjects in the images or audio," says Mills, "This suggests that dogs' ability to combine emotional cues may be intrinsic. As a highly social species, such a tool would have been advantageous and the detection of emotion in humans may even have been selected for over generations of domestication by us."
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