14 DAY TRIAL // Most dog owners admit that they have almost no difficulties when asked to guess what emotions their pet pooch is experiencing at any given moment.
According to a new study whose findings were published in the scientific journal Behavioural Processes, this is because dogs have facial expressions that humans are perfectly capable of interpreting.
The researchers who pieced together this theory concerning some people's ability of interpreting animal facial expressions reached their conclusions after asking a total of 50 volunteers to have a look at pictures of a police dog named Man and try to guess whether the pooch felt scared, happy, angry or in any other way. Daily Mail informs us that all of the volunteers who agreed to take part in this study were quite efficient when asked to interpret Mal's emotions just by looking at the dog's picture.
Commenting on the findings of these experiments, psychologist Dr. Tina Bloom made the following observations:
“There is no doubt that humans have the ability to recognise emotional states in other humans and accurately read other humans’ facial expressions. We have shown humans are also able to accurately – if not perfectly – identify at least one dog’s facial expressions.”
“Although humans often think of themselves as disconnected or even isolated from nature, our study suggests there are patterns that connect, and one of these is in the form of emotional communication,” Dr. Tina Bloom went on to argue.
Said psychologist and her colleagues believe that humans only got the chance to learn how to read a dog's facial expressions because of their living side by side with these animals for nearly 100,000 years now.
As they explain, this cohabitation ultimately translated into the two species' feeling empathic one towards the other, and this in turn led to their being able to interpret each other's emotions.
“I am not at all surprised science has finally accepted what we knew all along – dog and owner communicate perfectly well without words,” Beverley Cuddy, the editor of Dogs Today, told members of the press.