Humans' ability to read dog facial expressions is learned, not innate
NOVEMBER 12, 2019
by Max Planck Society
The study used photos of dogs with wolf-like faces and upright ears for emotion recognition. Credit: Juliane Bräuer
In a recent study published in Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from Germany and the United Kingdom assessed how experience with dogs affects humans' ability to recognize dog emotions. Participants who grew up in a cultural context with a dog-friendly attitude were more proficient at recognizing dog emotions. This suggests that the ability to recognize dogs' expressions is learned through age and experience and is not an evolutionary adaptation.
Dogs were the first domesticated animal, with humans and dogs sharing more than 40,000 years of social interactions and life together. According to the co-domestication hypothesis, this process allowed humans and dogs to evolve special emotional signals and cognitive skills that favor mutual understanding. We know, for example, that over the millennia, dogs have evolved the ability to understand human words, iconic signs, and other gestures, and research has shown that dogs can even use tone of voice and facial expressions to recognize human emotions. Beyond personal testimony from dog lovers, however, little attention has been paid to how well humans can understand their canine counterparts.
In the current study, led by Federica Amici of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Juliane Bräuer of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the researchers set out to understand how well humans can understand the emotional displays of dogs, and where that understanding comes from.
How well do we understand our species' best friend?
In order to test how well humans can understand the emotions behind dog facial expressions, researchers collected photographs of dogs, chimpanzees and humans displaying either happy, sad, angry, neutral, or fearful emotions as substantiated by the photographers. They then recruited 89 adult participants and 77 child participants and categorized them according to their age, the dog-positivity of their cultural context, and the participants' personal history of dog ownership.
More:
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-humans-ability-dog-facial-innate.html