Dogs Distinguish Human Emotions

Dog owners always claim that their dogs are capable of reading their emotions. Now scientists also say that the emotional connection between dogs and humans is real. Dogs mimic human moods. According to a report by AFP, researchers say that dogs can recognize whether humans are feeling good, bad, or experiencing other emotional states. Previous studies had shown that dogs could detect human emotions based on changes in their faces, but this research indicates that if a dog's owner is sad or happy, the dogs also pick up on those emotions. Dr. Ken Go, a psychology professor at the University of Lincoln in the UK, states: 'This is the first experimental research that shows dogs are capable of integrating auditory and visual data that indicate human emotions and converting them into dog emotions.' This experiment was conducted by a team of dog behavior researchers and psychologists from the UK and Brazil on 17 untrained household dogs. The researchers showed these dogs images of humans and dogs along with sounds that indicated positive or negative human emotions. To ensure that these dogs were not previously familiar with these sounds and images, they used English for dogs living in Portuguese-speaking households (in Brazil) and Portuguese for English dogs. The aim was to determine whether dogs can recognize human emotions based on sound and whether they can distinguish between positive and negative emotions. Natalie de Souza Aluquerc, a member of this research team, says: 'We found that when dogs hear positive sounds, they gaze longer at the related images, whether in human or dog faces. When they hear sounds related to negative emotions, they stare more at negative images.' This research shows that dogs can distinguish between two types of positive and negative emotions in human and dog sounds and relate them to their images. This means that dogs have some kind of internal psychological system for categorizing emotions. This advanced emotional behavior was previously observed only in monkeys.