People who HAVE dogs KNOW this to be True…..
No Surpise….
Researchers put dogs (awake and unrestrained) in MRI scanners to see the activity in different regions of their brains while the pooches looked at images of human facial expressions.
But then the brain scans showed something novel: The dogs were making distinctions between fear and anger, and fear and sadness, showing they can tell the difference between somewhat nuanced negative emotions.
“As far as we know, it’s the first time there is proof that dogs can distinguish between faces expressing two [similar] emotions,” said Laura V. Cuaya, a co-author of the study and postdoctoral researcher at the SCAN-Unit, University of Vienna…..
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The researchers ran a whole-brain analysis to look at patterns of response for those three negative emotions. “We found that in a different part of the brain, there can be a distinction between fear and anger and between fear and sadness,” Cuaya said.
She added that there did not seem to be a difference in processing between sadness and anger.
The researchers stressed that these findings do not mean dogs understand or experience emotions in the same way humans do.
“What they have demonstrated here is that the dog brain can distinguish human faces that are showing different emotions, but it does not show that the dog brain is perceiving, processing those emotions,” said Clive Wynne, founding director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, who was not involved with this study.
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