We ARISTOPETERS all know that our dogs have a gift for detecting when we are sad, happy, or angry and acting accordingly to offer us their affection. It is one of the qualities we value most in them, and now science has backed up what we have known for a long time: that dogs recognize our emotions.
A study by the University of Lincoln, United Kingdom, and the University of São Paulo, Brazil, supports the idea that our beloved canine friends are more than capable of interpreting our moods. Among different members of the same species, this is normal, but doing so with other species implies a greater degree of emotional intelligence.
We ARISTOPETERS already know that our pets are sensitive to changes in the moods of people who live in the household, as well as even people they do not know. Dogs perceive our emotions through a series of mental images and sounds, evaluate them, and subsequently interpret them. To do so, they must be able to compare these perceptions and establish rapid associations.
To conduct the research, 17 dogs were selected and shown images of humans expressing different emotions, each also associated with a specific sound (a pleasant tone of voice to express happiness, for example). After conducting the experiment, the researchers realized that the dogs recognized emotions better when there was agreement between facial expressions and tone of voice (much more so than when they were shown images alone), and were able to associate the connections and act accordingly.
The study's authors also point out that there is an important difference between recognizing emotions because you have spent time living with a particular human and are already familiar with them, and doing so with anyone. The dogs in the experiment had not previously met the people shown in the images, so the ability to associate emotional signals is inherent in dogs. They suggest that this may be due to the close relationship that humans have maintained with canines for centuries.
This interesting study was published in the journal Biology Letters of the British Royal Society. Other studies, such as one conducted by researchers in Hungary and published by the Hungarian Academy of Science at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, support these findings.
Ultimately, interesting experiments, years of study, and a great deal of work to determine something that all ARISTOPETERS already knew about our dogs: that they are the best!
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