Dogs Can Be Aware Of How You Feel, Study Says

Dogs which are considered as man's best friends can identify human emotions, according to a research. Medical News Today reported a recent study of the researchers from the School of Life Sciences at University of Lincoln in the U.K., which was published in the journal, Biology Letters. 

Its findings mainly involved the dogs' ability to make a distinction of human emotions. Studying the behavior and activities of 17 domestic dogs, the researchers showed the dogs photos of humans as these dogs displayed different emotions -- happy, playful, angry and aggressive. The team also played affirmative or negative video clips of barks and voices from canine and humans.

With all these techniques, the team found out that when dogs were presented a photo that matched the emotion with the video clip as if an angry facial expression accorded with an angry voice, the dogs would look at the photo intently and much longer.

"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," Dr. Kun Guo, the coauthor of the study from the School of Psychology at Lincoln explained.

"To do so require a system of internal categorization of emotional states. This cognitive ability has until now only been evidenced in primates and the capacity to do this across species only seen in humans," he continued.

Meanwhile, Science Daily likewise reported a study from the University of Helsinki -- showing how dogs view the emotional expressions of humans and dog faces. They found out that dogs observed at the eye region first and scrutinized the eyes longer than the mouth or nose areas.

Dogs were attracted in the face of a threat like the mouths of threatening dogs. On the other hand, dogs based their sensitivity of facial expressions on the entire face. The study involved 31 dogs with various breeds.

"The tolerant behavior strategy of dogs toward humans may partially explain the results. Domestication may have equipped dogs with a sensitivity to detect the threat signals of humans and respond them with pronounced appeasement signals," Sanni Somppi, a researcher from the University of Helsinki concluded.