A dog
IN PHOTO: A dog. REUTERS/Mike Segar

Dogs are able to distinguish happy faces from sad ones, researchers in Austria have found. The study, published in the journal Current Biology, says that this is the first time that evidence has been found of an animal reading the expressions of a different species.

For the experiment, researchers in Vienna trained 11 dogs, mostly border collies, by showing them only the upper half or lower half of a person’s face. The faces were angry and happy. Then they tested whether the dogs were able to recognise the difference between the human facial expressions by showing them different pictures from the ones the dogs had seen during training. To do this, the researchers showed the dogs a face that was the same half as the face used in training but of a different person, or the left half of the same face where the right half was used during training. Half the dogs were trained to touch an image of a happy face and the other group was trained to touch an angry face. By touching the picture with their nose, the dogs were able to determine whether the face was happy or angry. The animals were able to apply what they had learned during training to new faces as well.

The researchers, including Corsin Müller, an animal behaviour researcher at Messerli Research Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, concluded that the dogs recognised that a smiling mouth meant the same thing as smiling eyes. The researchers were not sure how dogs were able to do this, but it could be because of their long cohabitation with humans.

The study was inconclusive about whether a dog can understand the emotions behind a happy or angry face. The study did find that dogs who were rewarded for picking an angry face were not as adept at learning the task as dogs who picked the happy face. Study director Ludwig Huber of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, said that to better understand how these skills develop in dogs similar tests would have to be done with wolves.

To contact the writer, email: sonali.raj@gmail.com