All ARISTOPETERS 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 that we value most in them, and now science has backed up what we already knew for a long time: that dogs recognize our emotions.
A study from the University of Lincoln, United Kingdom, and the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, confirms 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 across different species implies a greater degree of emotional intelligence.
ARISTOPETERS already know that our pets are sensitive to changes in the moods of the people living in the home, as well as people they don't even know. Dogs pick up our emotions through a series of mental images and sounds, evaluate them, and then translate them. To do this, they must be able to compare these perceptions and establish quick associations.
To conduct the research, 17 dogs were selected and shown images of humans conveying different emotions, each of which was also associated with a specific sound (a pleasant tone of voice to express joy, for example). After the experiment, researchers realized that dogs recognized emotions better when there was concordance between facial expressions and tone of voice (much more so than when they were only shown images), being able to associate the links and act accordingly.
The authors of the study also clarify that there is an important difference between recognizing emotions because you have lived with a specific human for a long time and are already familiar with them, or doing so with anyone. The dogs in the experiment did not previously know the people in the images, so the ability to associate emotional cues is inherent in dogs. They suggest that this could be due to the close relationship that humans have maintained with canines for centuries.
This interesting study has been 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 Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, support these findings.
In short, interesting experiments, years of study, and a lot of work to determine something that all ARISTOPETERS already knew about our dogs: that they are the best!
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