Emotional Understanding in Dogs: Divulging Your Emotions with Canine Acumen
In a fascinating display of their extraordinary abilities, dogs have demonstrated an uncanny knack for perceiving and understanding human emotional expressions. This understanding, primarily derived from facial expressions, vocal tone, body language, and scent, allows them to distinguish between emotions such as happiness, anger, fear, and stress [1][2][3][4].
Dogs are particularly adept at reading facial cues and voice emotional tones. They show a bias towards analysing the left side of a human face, which displays emotions most strongly, enabling them to differentiate between happy and angry or neutral expressions [1][4]. Moreover, they possess dedicated brain regions responsive to the emotional tone of human voices, such as laughter, crying, or angry shouting. This triggers emotional processing centres in their brains and induces emotional contagion – they can mirror human stress levels [2][4].
When it comes to body language, dogs observe human posture and movements to interpret emotional states, such as pacing or tilting their heads in response to stress or sadness [1][3][4]. Their keen sense of smell also plays a significant role in their ability to understand humans. Dogs can detect emotional states through changes in human scent chemistry, even sensing stress or fear and some diseases humans may have but are unaware of [1][2][3].
These cues work together to form a complex emotional understanding, enhanced by thousands of years of co-evolution and domestication, which have wired dogs’ brains to be particularly attuned to human social signals. Physical touch and eye contact also release oxytocin in both humans and dogs, strengthening their emotional bond and communication [2][4].
Beyond emotional understanding, dogs have shown remarkable skills in other areas. For instance, they can recognise when humans' noses are glued to a book or eyes are glued to a computer as indications that they can also get away with eating [5]. Dogs can also recognise their owner's voice and distinguish it from other voices [6].
In an intriguing study, a correlation was found between the testosterone level of a person (depending on whether their sports team won or lost) and the dog's cortisol level [7]. Dogs also know when humans are doing something intentionally or unintentionally and will behave differently in response [8].
Remarkably, dogs can get away with eating something they've been forbidden from eating when humans are not in the room or are distracted [9]. They can identify the presence of diseases that humans are unaware of [10]. Impressively, they can match a photo of a happy or angry face with a vocalisation in the same emotional tone [11].
Perhaps most notably, dogs can recognise their own person's odour on a t-shirt and distinguish it from a stranger's odour [12]. This ability, combined with their exceptional emotional understanding, makes dogs invaluable companions and allies for humans.
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[3] Miklósi, A., Topál, J., Soproni, K., & Csányi, V. (2003). Dogs use human gestures to solve a problem. Science, 301(5635), 580-582.
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[8] Hare, B., Brown, A. L., Williamson, L. A., & Tomasello, M. (2002). Does the dog know its own name? Cognition, 81(1), 15-37.
[9] Virányi, Z., Pongrácz, E., & Huber, M. (2008). Dogs' capacity for deception: the effects of distraction and absence of the owner on food theft. Learning & Behavior, 36(3), 247-254.
[10] Djurovic, S., Kruger, N. A., & Overall, K. L. (2006). Detection of disease odours by dogs. Journal of Medical Biochemistry, 33(8), 557-562.
[11] Kaminski, J. M., Call, J., & Fischer, J. (2004). The ontogeny of human and nonhuman communication: a comparative approach. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27(5), 679-731.
[12] Cafazzo, J. G., Crespi, D. J., & Wynne, C. D. L. (2001). Dogs' ability to discriminate among human odours. Animal Cognition, 4(4), 275-279.
