Animals Dogs understand what's written all over your face

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Dogs are capable of understanding the emotions behind an expression on a human face. For example, if a dog turns its head to the left, it could be picking up that someone is angry, fearful or happy. If there is a look of surprise on a person's face, dogs tend to turn their head to the right. The heart rates of dogs also go up when they see someone who is having a bad day, say Marcello Siniscalchi, Serenella d'Ingeo and Angelo Quaranta of the University of Bari Aldo Moro in Italy. The study in Springer's journal Learning & Behavior is the latest to reveal just how connected dogs are with people. The research also provides evidence that dogs use different parts of their brains to process human emotions.

By living in close contact with humans, dogs have developed specific skills that enable them to interact and communicate efficiently with people. Recent studies have shown that the canine brain can pick up on emotional cues contained in a person's voice, body odour and posture, and read their faces.

In this study, the authors watched what happened when they presented photographs of the same two adults' faces (a man and a woman) to 26 feeding dogs. The images were placed strategically to the sides of the animals' line of sight and the photos showed a human face expressing one of the six basic human emotions: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust or being neutral.

The dogs showed greater response and cardiac activity when shown photographs that expressed arousing emotional states such as anger, fear and happiness. They also took longer to resume feeding after seeing these images. The dogs' increased heart rate indicated that in these cases they experienced higher levels of stress.

In addition, dogs tended to turn their heads to the left when they saw human faces expressing anger, fear or happiness. The reverse happened when the faces looked surprised, possibly because dogs view it as a non-threatening, relaxed expression. These findings therefore support the existence of an asymmetrical emotional modulation of dogs' brains to process basic human emotions.

"Clearly arousing, negative emotions seem to be processed by the right hemisphere of a dog's brain, and more positive emotions by the left side," says Siniscalchi.

The results support that of other studies done on dogs and other mammals. These show that the right side of the brain plays a more important part in regulating the sympathetic outflow to the heart. This is a fundamental organ for the control of the 'fight or flight' behavioural response necessary for survival.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-06-dogs-written.html#jCp

Orienting asymmetries and physiological reactivity in dogs’ response to human emotional faces

Abstract


Recent scientific literature shows that emotional cues conveyed by human vocalizations and odours are processed in an asymmetrical way by the canine brain. In the present study, during feeding behaviour, dogs were suddenly presented with 2-D stimuli depicting human faces expressing the Ekman’s six basic emotion (e.g. anger, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust, and neutral), simultaneously into the left and right visual hemifields. A bias to turn the head towards the left (right hemisphere) rather than the right side was observed with human faces expressing anger, fear, and happiness emotions, but an opposite bias (left hemisphere) was observed with human faces expressing surprise. Furthermore, dogs displayed higher behavioural and cardiac activity to picture of human faces expressing clear arousal emotional state. Overall, results demonstrated that dogs are sensitive to emotional cues conveyed by human faces, supporting the existence of an asymmetrical emotional modulation of the canine brain to process basic human emotions.


https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13420-018-0325-2
 
Dogs are capable of understanding the emotions behind an expression on a human face. For example, if a dog turns its head to the left, it could be picking up that someone is angry, fearful or happy. If there is a look of surprise on a person's face, dogs tend to turn their head to the right. The heart rates of dogs also go up when they see someone who is having a bad day, say Marcello Siniscalchi, Serenella d'Ingeo and Angelo Quaranta of the University of Bari Aldo Moro in Italy. The study in Springer's journal Learning & Behavior is the latest to reveal just how connected dogs are with people. The research also provides evidence that dogs use different parts of their brains to process human emotions.

By living in close contact with humans, dogs have developed specific skills that enable them to interact and communicate efficiently with people. Recent studies have shown that the canine brain can pick up on emotional cues contained in a person's voice, body odour and posture, and read their faces.

In this study, the authors watched what happened when they presented photographs of the same two adults' faces (a man and a woman) to 26 feeding dogs. The images were placed strategically to the sides of the animals' line of sight and the photos showed a human face expressing one of the six basic human emotions: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust or being neutral.

The dogs showed greater response and cardiac activity when shown photographs that expressed arousing emotional states such as anger, fear and happiness. They also took longer to resume feeding after seeing these images. The dogs' increased heart rate indicated that in these cases they experienced higher levels of stress.

In addition, dogs tended to turn their heads to the left when they saw human faces expressing anger, fear or happiness. The reverse happened when the faces looked surprised, possibly because dogs view it as a non-threatening, relaxed expression. These findings therefore support the existence of an asymmetrical emotional modulation of dogs' brains to process basic human emotions.

"Clearly arousing, negative emotions seem to be processed by the right hemisphere of a dog's brain, and more positive emotions by the left side," says Siniscalchi.

The results support that of other studies done on dogs and other mammals. These show that the right side of the brain plays a more important part in regulating the sympathetic outflow to the heart. This is a fundamental organ for the control of the 'fight or flight' behavioural response necessary for survival.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-06-dogs-written.html#jCp

I completely believe it. My puppy (well, he's only eight months old, but he doesn't look like a puppy) is constantly scanning my face to read my expression. That's particularly true when someone walks by our property when we're outside. His default reaction is to run full tilt, strain at the end of his chain, and bark his head off. When I call him, he comes back and looks intently at my face, which I try to keep reassuring or neutral since so far it's been kids home from school, ladies taking a walk etc. Even so, he sits at attention right on my feet and doesn't leave until they're gone.

I know I sound like every sappy, sentimental dog owner, but his eyes have an expression that's almost human.
 
I completely believe it. My puppy (well, he's only eight months old, but he doesn't look like a puppy) is constantly scanning my face to read my expression. That's particularly true when someone walks by our property when we're outside. His default reaction is to run full tilt, strain at the end of his chain, and bark his head off. When I call him, he comes back and looks intently at my face, which I try to keep reassuring or neutral since so far it's been kids home from school, ladies taking a walk etc. Even so, he sits at attention right on my feet and doesn't leave until they're gone.

I know I sound like every sappy, sentimental dog owner, but his eyes have an expression that's almost human.

It's pretty amazing that they can read our faces, and have such a clear understanding of what it means. Tens of thousands of years of living along side humans have enabled them to recognize even our non-verbal social cues.

I wonder if those kind of expressions developed, and were in some way influenced by interactions with humans.
 
Looks like horse are able to read emotional cues in humans too, according to this new study.

I believe that too. There has to be some intense communication between horse and human or I don't think you could get them to do things like this:
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I like to ride them, but I wasn't one of those horse mad teen-age girls. I had a friend like that, though. Her father bought her a horse but she had to pay for his keep by working at the stables. I went with her on a couple of week-ends, but I thought it was just awful. YUCK! A dog is bad enough, but cleaning out the straw in the stables, combing out their tails...It just wasn't worth it if I had to take care of them in order to be able to take them out on the trails. If you're not as squeamish it's a good deal, though. They're always looking for people to exercise the horses at the stables around here.

They're still not like dogs, though. Watch this:
 
My puppy is 5 months old and so far I didn't knew they can recognize things on TV,for example if she see a dog,she start barking.Nowadays I watch world cup in football,so she watch a bit with me,she look at the ball cause we use to play with ball all the time,anyone experience like this?
 
Oh I found this now researching, it was helpful to me; People often say that dogs can't actually see what is going on when they watch television --but is that true?
And what about modern TVs − does the higher resolution of the new screens better enable Fido to see what is going on?
“They probably see the new TVs just as well as they see the world in general,” answers Ernst Otto Ropstad, an associate professor at the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science. Ropstad specialises in animal vision.Now that modern TVs generate more frames per second, dogs can perceive the pictures as film, just like we do,” he says.
Fusing a rapid set of images into what our eyes register as a moving picture is called flicker fusion frequency. New TVs are much smoother than old TVs, which could only produce up to 50 new frames a second.
Animals vary with regard to how many frames they need to see per second before it fools their eyes and brains into viewing it as a moving picture, rather than a flickering image on a screen.http://sciencenordic.com/do-dogs-see-what’s-happening-tv
 
Oh I found this now researching, it was helpful to me; People often say that dogs can't actually see what is going on when they watch television --but is that true?
And what about modern TVs − does the higher resolution of the new screens better enable Fido to see what is going on?
“They probably see the new TVs just as well as they see the world in general,” answers Ernst Otto Ropstad, an associate professor at the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science. Ropstad specialises in animal vision.Now that modern TVs generate more frames per second, dogs can perceive the pictures as film, just like we do,” he says.
Fusing a rapid set of images into what our eyes register as a moving picture is called flicker fusion frequency. New TVs are much smoother than old TVs, which could only produce up to 50 new frames a second.
Animals vary with regard to how many frames they need to see per second before it fools their eyes and brains into viewing it as a moving picture, rather than a flickering image on a screen.http://sciencenordic.com/do-dogs-see-what’s-happening-tv

For what it's worth, my eight month old puppy watches the tv screen, although it's usually when the people are rather emotional, so I don't know if he's reacting to the visuals or to the distress in their voices.

He hates rap and metal music. When my son has music videos on the screen he gets through Roku he starts to howl. :)

My cats definitely see other cats I tv. They attack them. :)
 

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