Dog News: Studies Prove That Pets Can Understand Human Emotions

Great news for dog lovers: Recent studies show that your pooch can understand you more than you think. In fact, they are proven to comprehend human emotions through facial recognition and voice.

Researchers from the University of Lincoln in the UK and the University of São Paulo, Brazil released a study in the journal "Biology Letters" showing how dogs can form their own understanding of a person's emotional state mainly through their facial expression.

The study involved 17 domesticated dogs, wherein they were shown images of humans and their fellow dogs that portrayed various negative and positive emotions which were all accompanied by auditory cues. "What they found was that the dogs would look longest at the photo of the emotional expression that corresponded with the sound being played," reported Bustle.

What was interesting was that none of the dogs were training or familiarized with the visual and auditory stimuli they encountered. This means that all of their responses were based on instinct.

According to one of the researchers from the University of Lincoln, Dr. Kun Guo, "Previous studies have indicated that dogs can differentiate between human emotions from cues such as facial expressions, but this is not the same as emotional recognition."

"Our study shows that dogs have the ability to integrate two different sources of sensory information into a coherent perception of emotion in both humans and dogs," he clarified. "To do so requires a system of internal categorization of emotional states. This cognitive ability has until now only been evidenced in primates and the capacity to do this across species only seen in humans."

In another study from researchers Victoria Ratcliffe and David Reby of the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex in the U.K, dogs are also seen to process and associate familiar words with how humans speak, particularly with their emotions.

As reported by Tech Times, the study showed how more than 250 dogs responded to their owners' voices.

"The researchers pointed out that their study does not suggest that dogs can fully understand the complexity of human speech albeit it does show there are similarities in the way humans and dogs process language," the site summarized.

The researchers wrote, "Our results provide insights into mechanisms of interspecific vocal perception in a domesticated mammal and suggest that dogs may share ancestral or convergent hemispheric specializations for processing the different functional communicative components of speech with human listeners."

While the on-going study for a deeper understanding of how dogs work continues to deepen, many pet lovers already consider them as man's silent best friend.