The fact that when we get home from work and our dog comes to greet us or not, it already has a scientific explanation. For the first time, an experiment with dogs has shown that dogs are able to differentiate between the different emotional expressions of the human face, being able to easily discriminate between angry and happy faces . The research, carried out by the Messerli Research Institute of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna (Austria), has been published in the journal Current Biology .
” This is the first solid evidence of this ability in non-human animals to distinguish between facial emotions of another species,” says Ludwig Huber, co-author of the study, to the Sinc agency. And it is that not even chimpanzees or gorillas have shown this ability to glimpse the feelings on the faces of other different species.
For their experiment, the researchers had dogs of different breeds, including border collies, retrievers, mongrels or shepherds. First, they were shown 15 pairs of images of the upper half or the lower half of the same person’s face (they could be seen, therefore, either the eyes or the mouth) with expressions of joy and anger .
Finally, they trained 11 dogs for the final experiment that consisted of testing whether or not they were able to transfer their knowledge about the emotion with which they would be rewarded by successfully distinguishing expressions of anger and joy from faces of all kinds, even strangers. .
The results showed that apart from being able to identify facial expressions, the dogs transferred what they had learned to new situations and new unfamiliar faces ; that is, even if they had not seen that face before, they were able to distinguish the two essential meanings of faces: a smiling face is positive and an angry face is negative .
“They seem to respond to an angry face as they would respond to an intimidating stimulus, indicating that they associate the meanings with both expressions . They could only solve the task by memorizing what a happy or angry face looks like, for example, associating a smile or a happy mouth with happy eyes. They solved that task based on an emotional expression. However, we do not know in detail how dogs are able to discriminate between one expression and another. We only know that they are capable ”, clarifies Huber.
Do dogs show empathy? Do they share our feelings? Are there more species that are capable of recognizing emotions on human faces? This will be the next step of the investigation. “If we know that animals are capable of reading, understanding and reacting to our emotions, this research will have a great impact on knowledge about human-animal interactions and on animal welfare,” the researchers conclude.
