A recent study reveals the surprising discovery of one way dogs find out how you feel. It’s always been known and told said from generation to generation that you shouldn’t act aggressively not fearful around dogs in order to prevent them from attacking you. While that kind of behavior read relies on the dogs’ ability to read body language, the study in question suggests that they can also read facial expression, just the way humans do amongst themselves.
It’s unclear whether this is something that dogs inherited since their domestication or whether it has been an ability that they have always possessed. It is, however, most certainly related to the dog-human relationship as not only are they capable of telling what the mood of a person is, but also know to react to it. From this perspective, this phenomenon could easily be considered taught response.
For example, when house dogs sense that a person is angry, they tend to look away. Researchers from the University of Helsinki in Finland, Europe believe that in the evolutionary process dogs have learned how to detect both congenial moods as well as hostile attitudes as another method of self-preservation. That is why sometimes, even if the canines have no issue with making eye contact with other representatives of their race, may sometimes display reluctance at doing it with the human species.
the researchers conducting the study used 31 dogs, belonging to 13 different breeds, that were trained through positive reinforcement and clicker-based response to stay in front of a screen without being told or forced to do so. Throughout the series of images that were shown to each dog separately, the researchers made use of eye gaze tracking to distinguish the ways the subjects reacted to different emotions of humans or other dogs.
According to the study, dogs would spend a great amount of time staring at the eye area – much more than other portions of the face such as the mouth or nose – but overall based their reaction upon a complete scan of the face. That suggests that dogs can tell what you fell after they scan the entirety of your face, not just from a single reaction such as a smile.
When shown images of other dogs, however, the subjects seemed to focus on other features rather than the eyes – as it had been in the case of humans. When the image of an aggressive dog was shown on the screen, the subjects would linger more on the mouth rather than eyes.
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Michael Turner
