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 Researchers found that by combining information from different
senses dogs form abstract mental representations of positive and
negative emotional states in people.
Previous studies have shown that dogs can differentiate between
human emotions from signs such as facial expressions. But this is
not the same as emotional recognition, according to Dr Kun Guo, from
the University of Lincoln's School of Psychology.
"This is the first empirical experiment that will show dogs can
integrate visual and oratory inputs to understand or differentiate
human emotion as dog emotion," Kun told Reuters.
Experiments were carried out by a team of animal behavior experts
and psychologists at the University of Lincoln, UK, and University
of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
They presented 17 untrained domestic dogs with images and sounds
conveying either positive or negative emotional expressions in
humans and dogs.
 The dogs used in the testing were unfamiliar with the procedure;
avoiding any chance of conditioning. The vocalization sound
accompanying the human faces was also unfamiliar.
"We used Portuguese to British dogs so they weren't habituated with
any words, they weren't familiar with any words. So, we wanted to
see if the dogs could assess the emotional content of the human
voices and whether they would actually discriminate the emotional
information within them," explained Natalia De Souza Albuquerque, a
PhD student in experimental psychology.
The results, published recently in the Royal Society journal Biology
Letters, found that dogs spent significantly longer looking at the
facial expressions which matched the emotional state of the
vocalization, for both human and canine subjects.
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"What we found is that when dogs were hearing positive sounds they
would look longer to positive faces, both human and dog. And when
they were listening to negative sounds they would look longer to
negative, angry faces," added De Souza Albuquerque.
The study shows that dogs can integrate two different sources of
sensory information into a perception of emotion in both humans and
dogs. This means dogs must have a system of internal categorization
of emotional states. Among animal groups, it's a cognitive ability
previously only evidenced in primates.
The researchers believe that the ability to combine emotional cues
may be inherent to dogs. As a highly social species, detecting
emotions in humans would have helped them in their domestication by
people over the generations.
Dr Kun Guo now wants to conduct more experiments in a bid to better
understand how man's canine companions decipher human emotions.
"(So) we can see whether dogs can use a human-like principle or
human-like strategy to perceive, understand and respond to human
emotion," he said.
"If we can understand this, surely we can understand dogs better."
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