Dogs Can Recognize Human Emotions | Dogalize
What dog lovers have always known, now is confirmed by science: dogs can recognize human emotions. For the first time, researchers have shown that dogs are able to combine information from different senses and form abstract mental representations of positive and negative emotional states – an ability that has never previously been observed outside of humans.
The study conducted by researchers from University of Lincoln, UK, and University of Sao Paolo, Brazil, has shown that dogs do not simply display learned or random behaviors when responding to the expressions of people and other dogs.
Seventeen domestic dogs were presented with photos of facial expressions and audio clips of vocalisations conveying different combinations of positive (happy or playful) and negative (angry or aggressive) emotional expressions, in humans and dogs. The team found the dogs spent significantly longer looking at the facial expressions which matched the emotional state of the vocalisation, for both human and canine subjects.
This indicates that dogs have mental representations of positive and negative emotional states of others.
If the ability to distinguish between good and evil is typical of men, does it mean that dogs are a bit of human nature? There was no need of hearing this from scientists, we already knew.
Federica Lauda
Source: sciencedaily
Photo: livescience
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