Dogs are the only other animal that is capable of interpreting and responding to human emotions by evaluating the emotional expressions on human’s faces. The interpretive ability extends beyond the dog’s owner or people the dog is familiar with.
A group of dogs was trained to discern if a person was happy or angry by looking at photographs of people’s faces. The dogs could only see the upper or lower part of the people’s face. Each dog did not observe both halves of the human face during training.
The dogs were tested for their ability to discriminate between human emotions. The dogs were able to determine if a person was angry or happy by seeing either half of the person’s face. The dogs were all shown to be able to discern emotion in human’s the dogs never saw before. No other sensory input was available to the dogs but sight.
This is the first study of dogs that proves that dogs can discern human emotions. The dogs are limited in the repertoire of emotions that they may understand compared to humans but happy and angry are well within dog’s understanding of human emotion. The researchers propose that the dogs learned to discern emotion from previous experience with angry and happy people.
Dogs have been associated with people for at least 18,000 years and possibly a long as 32,000 years. It is theoretically possible that dogs acquired some of their capacity to discern human emotion through genetic transfer. A transposon is a small element of DNA that can be transferred between organisms. It is possible that dog’s long association with man and constant licking of their human’s produced a gene transfer that facilitated dog’s interpretation of emotion in man.
