Study: Dogs can react differently depending on humans’ emotional cues

A recent study by Brigham Young University professor Ross Flom found that dogs can do more than detect their master’s emotional cues.

Flom’s aim was to see whether facial and vocal expressions of humans can have an effect on a dog’s exploratory and point-following behaviour.

“We know that dogs are sensitive to our emotional cues,” Flom said on BYU News. “But we wanted to know: Do they use these emotional cues?”

Flom conducted two experiments where he recorded the dogs’ frequency and response time to act according to what was being asked of them. The first experiment was conducted in silence with only pointing gestures to direct the dog to a hidden reward. The second experiment was paired with either positive behaviour like smiling or negative behaviour such as frowning.

Watch: Does your dog understand you? (Brigham Young University on YouTube)

The results of the study indicated that first, positive affective facial and vocal expression did not increase the amount of time that a dog takes to follow the pointing gesture. Second, dogs took longer to follow the gesture when there is negative affective expression. Finally, dogs will follow the gesture as long as their attention is on the reward even if there is negative affect from the human.

This means that dogs not only detect emotional cues from their humans, they can also respond differently according to the emotions and behaviour that they hear and see from facial expressions and vocal tones.

Flom’s study was published in “Animal Cognitions” with Peggy Gartman as co-author.