Dogs Read Facial Expression Like Humans

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A new study reveals that dogs read facial expressions mostly as humans do. Dogs can sense if their owners are angry and they tend to look away.

According to reports from Health Day, dogs pay close attention to threatening to help them survive as they evolve. However, dogs were found to have a different response when it comes to humans or their owners.

This may have evolved as they learned how to deal with conflicts with humans, becoming more domesticated, according to researchers from the University of Helsinki in Finland. The findings were published in the journal PLOS ONE, reports Tech Times. This is the first evidence of emotion-related gaze patterns in a nonprimate animal, according to the researchers.

"The tolerant behavior strategy of dogs toward humans may partially explain the results. Domestication may have equipped dogs with a sensitivity to detect the threat signals of humans and respond to them with pronounced appeasement signals," researcher Sanni Somppi said in a university news release.

They found that dogs had different responses to threatening expressions depending on where the expressions come from; other dogs or humans. They found that dogs tend to look longer at threatening dog faces but looked away from threatening human faces.

In the study, the researchers analyzed 31 dogs from 13 breeds. The dogs were all given positive training and clicker-trained to stay still in front of a monitor without an act of command or restraint.

The team used eye gaze tracking to see how dogs view the emotions of both human and their fellow dogs.

The researchers observed that dogs first looked at the eyes and typically lingered in that area longer than at the nose or mouth. The dogs based their perception upon scanning the whole face. This suggests that dogs do not sense emotions from just a single facial feature. Like humans, they piece together emotions from all facial features.

The tendency to look away when seeing threatening human faces may be an evolutionary adaptation, according to the researchers. As dogs became domesticated, they bond better with humans. This evolution may have equipped the dogs with sensitivity to detect emotions from humans and respond to the with reconciliatory actions.

Previous studies from the university revealed that familiar faces, social interaction and other socially-attached objects in images attract the canines' attention. Charles Darwin had proposed 150 years ago that there are evolutionary roots shared between humans and animals in terms of emotional expressions.

Take a look on how researchers scanned the dogs' face:

Science: How #dogs gazing is observed @helsinkiuni read the article @PLOSONE https://t.co/wFewBpvHlJ pic.twitter.com/gZ1uGGSLRx

— Laura Hänninen (@LauraTHanninen) January 19, 2016