“This ability to perceive emotions in humans is really hard to find in other species,” says Rául Hernández Pérez, professor of psychology at the University of Vienna and first author of the study. “Chimpanzees have a harder time than dogs. Wolves can also do it, but not at the same level as dogs can.”
Looking for dogs who could perform that feat, she and Hernández Pérez recruited 14 cooperative canines, consisting of 11 border collies—a highly trainable breed—two golden retrievers, and one Labrador, the last three of which were already working as service animals.
Over the course of several days, that brief five seconds was steadily extended to 10 full minutes. The dogs were then introduced to the headphones they would have to wear while in the machine to protect their hearing. “The headphones are not uncomfortable, but they’re weird,” says Cuaya. Finally, the dogs practiced holding their pose in a mock MRI scanner, and only then were they ready for the real, clanking, buzzing, banging machine.
Next, the dogs were once again shown images of happy and neutral faces, but along with those they were also shown angry, frightened, and sad ones. The researchers were trying to determine whether the dogs processed human faces in a binary way—registering the positive, happy face in one part of the brain and the three negative ones together in one other part, or if each negative emotion had its own discrete brain region.
What dogs’ brains reveal about the dog-human bond
That was the result they got. Sadness and fear, for example, lit up the right rostral supra sylvian gyrus—which, in humans, contributes to the processing of visual information. Anger and fear were processed in the right ectosylvian gyrus and the left splenal gyrus—the former integrating visual, auditory, and other sensory information, and the latter managing visual perception, spatial orientation, and episodic memory.
This isn’t the first study to find that dogs respond in unique ways to human faces. Other research has shown that when a human face is happy, for example, dogs look more at the eyes than the mouth. They examine emotional faces longer than they examine neutral ones. And they have more difficulty reading the faces of people who are of a different gender from their principal caregiver.
“Humans are not so good at perceiving the emotions of our dogs,” says Cuaya. “We are confused by them. Maybe this work can be an invitation to try to be more aware of the emotions of our dogs and how they are expressing [them].”
The dog-human love story—which has been going on for some 14,000 years now—has been a long and tender one. The more we understand the canine contribution to that bond, the more we can improve our own.
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