Dogs can distinguish human emotions: what scientists have discovered

Austrian and Hungarian scientists have found that dogs can distinguish not only a person's general mood but also individual emotions — joy, sadness, fear, and anger. An MRI study showed that dogs' brains react differently to different facial expressions, including similar negative states. Joy activates the reward system, while fear overlaps with reactions to other emotions.

Austrian and Hungarian scientists conducted a study in which they used MRI to examine brain activity in dogs as they viewed images of human faces with different emotional expressions. In the first part of the experiment, dogs were shown happy and neutral faces: joy activated the temporal cortex and caudate nucleus — areas associated with processing complex information and the reward system, similar to the reaction to praise or the expectation of a treat. In the second part, scientists presented faces expressing sadness, fear, and anger. It turned out that different negative emotions activate different brain regions: sadness and fear engaged one area, anger and fear another, with the reaction to fear overlapping with reactions to other states. Researchers attribute this fine-tuned perception to millennia of domestication: the ancestors of dogs that lived alongside humans gained an advantage from sensitivity to human behavior. The next step will be to compare the processing of emotional signals by the human and dog brain.

Dogs can distinguish human emotions: what scientists have discovered