New research has shown that dogs can read human emotions if they combine information from different senses.
They are the only creatures aside from humans who have that ability.
A team of animal behaviour experts and psychologists have shown that dogs form abstract mental representations of positive and negative emotional states, rather than just displaying learned behaviours.
Last year, Researchers found that dogs could tell whether a person was happy or angry just by looking at their face.
Researcher Dr Kun Guo, from the University of Lincoln’s School of Psychology, said: “Previous studies have indicated that dogs can differentiate between human emotions from cues such as facial expressions, but this is not the same as emotional recognition.
“Our study shows that dogs have the ability to integrate two different sources of sensory information into a coherent perception of emotion in both humans and dogs.
“To do so requires a system of internal categorisation of emotional states. This cognitive ability has until now only been evidenced in primates and the capacity to do this across species only seen in humans.”
Leave a Reply