Ask any dog owner, and they will confidently tell you how their pet telepathically knows exactly what they’re feeling at all times, and how their emotional connection is beyond words, delving into the incandescently spiritual.
While this may sound like a lot of bunkum and balderdash, it turns out there may be some hard science behind this seemingly irrational conviction.
A series of unrelated studies have all recently concluded, via different methodologies, that dogs actually can tell what humans are feeling, or at least that they are able to accurately read human facial expressions.
A study done on eleven dogs at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, found that pups can accurately distinguish between happy and angry facial expressions.
It is likely that animals developed this ability because it allows them to anticipate humans’ behavioral responses and adjust their own conduct accordingly.
Canines, however, excel over other mammals at their ability to correctly discriminate human behavioral cues.
Researchers at the University of Helsinki found that the social gazing behavior of dogs resembles that of humans, beginning with observation of the eyes, which garner longer attention than the nose or mouth areas.
Interestingly, dogs’ viewing behavior was dependent on the species being viewed.
When faced with a picture of an aggressive dog, the response was longer looking, but the same threat in a human face provoked immediate avoidance.
This may mean that domestication made canines sensitive to human threat signals, and conditioned an automatic appeasement response.
This is the first evidence of emotion-related gaze patterns in non-primates, providing support for Darwin’s proposal that human and animal emotional expressions have common evolutionary roots.
An even more intriguing empirical experiment was jointly carried out by a team of animal behavioral experts and psychologists at the University of Lincoln, UK, and University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
They presented 17 untrained dogs with images of human and canine facial expressions in combination with emotional vocalizations.
To avoid word habituation bias, they used Portuguese with British dogs and vice versa.
When the dogs were listening to positive sounds, they spent significantly more time looking at the matching human and dog facial expressions.
Essentially, since this implies that dogs have the ability to integrate two different forms of sensory information into a perception of emotion, it means they have an internal system of emotional categorization.
As the dogs hadn’t been previously trained or familiarized with the task, the implication is that canines have an intrinsic ability to recognize feelings.
Among animal groups, this had previously only been found in primates.
As an evolutionary trait, this makes sense.
A dog’s ability to detect emotional cues in people would have assisted it in living with humans.
The domestication of dogs and other animals has long been associated with living together in close quarters within relatively small communities.
The beginning of this custom marks the 32,000-year-old split between dogs and wolves that set them on divergent evolutionary paths— during which it seems that, as a result of their communal relationship, humans and canines developed some of the same traits over the same time period.
The positive selection for genes responsible for digestion, metabolism, and some neurological processes overlap for both people and dogs, which suggests a joint genomic evolution.
A similar, previous study done on contagious yawning showed that dogs yawn more in response to their owner’s yawns than to those of strangers.
In humans, contagious yawning occurs as a form of empathy, and if we extrapolate that to dogs, this might indicate a rudimentary form of empathy, resulting from an emotional connection.
It’s been well established that emotional contagion is common in primates, but interestingly, Teresa Romero’s findings are the first to document yawning catching between species.
When it comes to dogs, however, the ability to perceive and interpret our emotions comes from much more than their eyesight.
CAN DOGS TRULY SMELL FEAR?
Imagine having such a powerful sense of smell you could pick out a single rotten apple from two million barrels.
Olfaction is believed to be canines’ most powerful sense and possibly their most important one, as they truly do navigate the world through their noses.
This canine super power has long made dogs an integral part of military and police forces everywhere, where they serve to track everything from missing and injured people, to bombs, land mines, and drugs.
While their ability to find and identify objects has been known for years, it is their ability to sniff out illness and changes in the human body that is the current focus of worldwide scientific research.
In 1989, a British journal published the first report of a dog being able to detect malignant melanoma in its owner by smelling the lesion.
Since then, countless scientific studies have confirmed that dogs can be trained to detect cancerous cells by smelling tumors and biological samples.
So, just as they’re able to detect a rotten apple in two million barrels, their noses are sensitive enough to detect cancer markers in a person’s breath, urine, or blood.
Additionally, many dogs have been trained to predict seizures in humans, sometimes by as much as hours in advance.
Although the mechanism by which they do is still the subject of research, many experts attribute it to that perceptive canine nose.
So, it should not come as a surprise that, in addition to illness and metabolic changes, dogs can also smell our emotions.
The old saying that dogs can smell fear has proven to be accurate, with research showing that they can smell chemicals our body releases when we’re afraid.
But among all the smells they’re exposed to, there’s evidence to show that their nose does play favorites.
An Emory University neuro-imaging study about odor processing in dogs found that the scent of their owner sparked activation in the “reward center” of their brains.
The dogs in the experiment were exposed to five different smells—self, familiar human, strange human, familiar dog, and strange dog.
Significantly, the familiar human was not the handler, but very specifically the dog’s owner, and this scent was prioritized over anything or anyone else.
DO DOGS UNDERSTAND “I LOVE YOU”?
It’s a well-known fact that dogs can hear much more than we can.
Due to their wolf ancestry, dogs are equipped to hear much higher pitches than humans, a truly necessary skill when hunting small prey in the wild.
And, although higher pitches are where they truly shine, dog’s ears can pick up sounds that are barely audible to us in the lower end of the audible frequencies as well.
Additionally, through domestication, dogs’ hearing evolved one step further, by allowing them to recognize human speech patterns and interpret them.
Researchers in Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, studied canine brain activity in response to different human and dog sounds, including voices, barks and the meaningful grunts and sighs both species emit.
Surprisingly, the study revealed a high degree of correspondence on the ways in which human and dog brains process emotionally laden vocal sounds.
Across both species, joyful noises particularly light up the auditory cortex, underscoring the strong communication system behind the human/dog bond.
In short, across a wide variety of studies, the conclusions are remarkably similar.
Dogs are not just evolutionarily conditioned by their domestication to recognize behavioral cues and respond in specific ways, they’re also physically hardwired to pick up on human and canine emotions.
With scientific support, we can all relish the fact that our dogs experience our emotions just as strongly as they do their own.
The bond between a dog and their human is very special and, as with family, a dog owners’ instinctive hunches and non-verbal communication help build and strengthen these bonds.
As pet advocates, we understand that bond, as well as the need for proper medical care for your furry family members.
For information about pet care, our review of the 10 Best Pet Insurance Companies of 2019 will help you explore options, compare prices, and navigate through additional resources.