Your Dog May Know You’re Sad Just by Looking at Your Face, Study Finds

There’s a reason dogs are trusted as emotional companions. If it seems like they have a nearly supernatural ability to sense human emotion, it’s because they practically do. As researchers at the University of Vienna recently found, dogs are especially good at parsing the emotions we humans are expressing with our faces.

The study, published in iScience, used fMRI scans to watch what happened inside dogs’ brains while they looked at photographs of human faces showing happiness, sadness, anger and fear. One of the study’s limitations is also one of the reasons the researchers were able to complete it at all. It’s difficult to get humans to sit still for an MRI scan, let alone a dog. The researchers had to use a specific breed, border collies, because they were especially good at sitting still on command. Border collies are great at following social cues and love following human orders.

In the first experiment, researchers found that happy human faces activated areas including the dogs’ temporal cortex and caudate nucleus. In a follow-up experiment involving 12 dogs, researchers went further, finding distinct brain activity patterns when the animals viewed fearful, angry and sad faces.

Dogs Can Apparently Read Your Face, Even When You’re Trying to Hide It

The researchers found that the dogs could distinguish between several nuanced expressions of emotion, particularly negative ones. That doesn’t necessarily mean that dogs totally understand emotion. They don’t look at your sad face and know that you’re sad because of your recent breakup. They just know that you’re sad.

In the real world, they have more information to work with than a still image of a sad face. Dogs pick up on and respond to a variety of cues, including body language, vocal tics, and even a person’s smell can tip off their mood.

While the study primarily focused on collies, broadly speaking, the study does offer some direct evidence of something that dog owners have long suspected: our precious, angelic little pooches really do seem to know what we’re feeling.

They don’t know why you’re in a bad mood. But they know you’re in one, which is a lot more than some people can say about their human partners.

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