I find it amazing how Stanley, Albert, and Emma can pick up whether someone at home is upset, sad or happy and how they respond accordingly.
Dogs are great observers. They pay attention to your body posture, facial expressions and every move you make. The way you walk, the way you speak, the volume and tone of your voice can tell your dog whether you are happy, angry, anxious or sad.
Being sensitive to other’s emotions and being able to recognize emotions is a useful and advantageous social tool in highly social species like dogs.
Research has demonstrated that dogs can differentiate between human emotions from signs such as facial expressions and body language. In the past twenty years, research has highlighted dogs’ abilities to read human faces. Not only dogs can discriminate smiling human faces from blank neutral expressions, but dogs will also select the owner’s smiling face more often than the neutral expression.
Your dog does not understand every word you say, but she can certainly differentiate between a happy or angry voice. In a study, researchers presented dogs with either human or dog faces. The facial expressions were happy/playful or angry/aggressive. The faces were paired with the sound of a voice of the same individual. Dogs looked significantly longer at the face whose expression was consistent with the mood of the voice. These studies highlight that dogs can extract and integrate visual and auditory information and discriminate between positive and negative emotions from both humans and dogs. This may explain why Fluffy knows when to give you a puppy face when you find out she ate your sandwich.
Domestic canines are known for their well-developed social communication skills. They respond flexibly to human emotional cues. This incredible ability to communicate and learn to discriminate human facial expressions may have helped dogs adapt to human society.
Take a look at this video and you’ll really know how sensitive dogs are to human emotion:
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