In order to ensure that the dogs weren’t responding to something familiar, the voices of the humans were in a language the dog wasn’t familiar with and that was Brazilian Portuguese.
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Based on the results, researchers found that the dog subjects took their time looking at facial expressions matching the emotional state of the vocalizations they heard from both people and other dogs.
Cognitive empathy has been identified among dogs, in a new study which helps further prove that a canine pet is indeed man’s best friend.
But this study showed that dogs could go beyond recognising facial cues to actual emotional perception.
The researchers noted that the length of time that a dog looked at an image offered insight into whether the dog attached social meaning to the emotion being conveyed and whether he or she integrated stimuli from different sources in doing so. “Moreover, dogs performed in this way without any training or familiarization with the models, suggesting that these emotional signals are intrinsically important”.
Dr Kun Guo, a scientist from the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom, studied dogs’ abilities to integrate visual and auditory cues to recognise emotions in other dogs and humans.
“Our findings are the first to show that dogs truly recognise emotions in humans”. They combine the information received and perceive it as an emotion and they can differentiate between emotions, which means they have an internal system of categorization.
The findings reveal that it’s not only humans that can determine what kind of emotional state another creature is feeling.
Animal behavior experts and psychologists from universities in Lincoln and Sao Paolo showed how dogs use abstract mental representations of both negative and positive emotions.
During the experiment supervised by the joint Brazilian-British team, 17 dogs were tested for recognizing human emotions. The authors noted that the trait to recognize emotions of humans must have been favored as selective breeding and domestication of dogs spread among human communities.
The sounds were played to the dogs without any prior training.
Even more strikingly, human beings had been considered the only species where almost every individual possesses this ability.
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For dogs to live with us, they had to learn to understand both our verbal and nonverbal messages – staying away from humans who looked angry, for example.
