Dogs Can Successfully Interpret Human Facial Expressions
According to a New Study

We all know the adage, “Dog is man’s best friend.” Of course, if it was up to us, the saying would be, “Dogs are everyone’s best friend.” We’re dog people.

Now, there’s a new study that suggests a new level of companionship on the part of dogs and their relationship with their master(s). In the Journal of Animal Cognition, an article entitled, Dogs’ comprehension of referential emotional expressions: familiar people and familiar emotions are easier, conducted several trials to see if dogs could discriminate between human facial expressions and regulate their own behaviors based on those readings.

According to the study, five groups of dogs were tested in two experiments: “the first group observed the owner delivering two different emotional messages (happiness and fear) towards two identical objects hidden behind barriers, and the second group observed the owner delivering the same emotional messages but with no-objects present in the room. The third and the fourth groups observed the owner delivering a happy versus a neutral, and a negative versus a neutral emotional message towards the hidden objects. Finally, the fifth group observed a stranger acting like the owner of the first group.”

An interesting finding from this study was that When the owner was acting as the informant, “dogs seemed to be capable of distinguishing between a fearful and happy emotional expression and preferentially chose to investigate a box eliciting an expression of happiness rather than of fear or neutrality.” However, conversely, dogs seemed to have “greater difficulty in distinguishing between the fearful and neutral emotional messages delivered by the owner and between the happy and fearful expressions delivered by the stranger.”

In sum, the study was able to conclude that dogs have learned to associate their owners’ positive emotional messages to positive outcomes, but, surprisingly, have relatively more difficulty reading negative emotions. Moreover, not so surprisingly, the study demonstrates that dogs are able to read the expressions of their owners relatively better than strangers.

Source: Merola, I., Prato-Previde, E., Lazzaroni, M. et al. Anim Cogn (2014) 17: 373. doi:10.1007/s10071-013-0668-1