Do you know how the relationship between a dog and a human is built?

Dogs' ability to understand human expressions is vital for relationships with people

Researchers at USP (University of São Paulo) believe that the animal's ability to understand human expressions is one of the key points for this relationship.

The teacher's article Briseida Dôgo de Resende and researcher Natalia Albuquerque, both from the Institute of Psychology (IP) at USP, discusses the emotion perception abilities of dogs, how this perception is used by them and brings suggestions for future investigations, such as personality, levels of attachment to the dog and demographic factors.

“The motivation for writing the article was to bring these ideas to the community, taking into account how far dogs go to read our emotions“, points out Natalia to Journal of USP. “Our study brings new discussions on the topic, in addition to bringing together in a single article the main findings on dogs’ abilities to perceive and interpret human emotional expressions”, he adds.

The article Dogs functionally respond to and use emotional information from human expressions (🇬🇧), published in the magazine Evolutionary Human Sciences, is a systematic review, that is, when the authors present discussions and conclusions based on the existing scientific literature on the topic.

Natalia says that 61 references were used, chosen according to their relevance in the area.

One of the new discussions that the article brings is the use by dogs of emotional information from humans to solve social problems. For example, these animals prefer to approach smiling people rather than those who are smiling.aiva.

The relationship between dog and human

Professor Briseida explains that the development of dogs' ability to understand human expressions can be thought of in two moments: during the evolution of the species and during the individual history of each dog. “Natural selection may have acted to favor the survival of dogs that are more adept at learning about human expressions of emotions,” she explains. However, she emphasizes that it is still not possible to say exactly how this evolution occurred. But, when approaching its owners, the dog begins to recognize emotions and adapts to them.

Dogs not only recognize human emotions, but they also understand the consequences of this and respond accordingly to each expression.

“These skills were critical for bringing the two species closer together, for establishing bonds and maintaining relationships. Nowadays, we share our lives with animals who are attuned to us and who can understand us”, says Natalia Albuquerque.

Future discussions

At the end of the article, the authors provide suggestions for approaches to new studies. For them, investigating personality, levels of attachment to the dog and demographic factors can be important to understand emotional communication between these animals and humans.

This ability, in addition to strengthening the relationship between the two species, is also beneficial for the dogs' safety. Briseida Resende explains that the tendency to move away from people with raiva, for example, avoids dangerous situations, while approaching happy people can be associated with gaining rewards.

There are also studies that link human expressions to physiological changes in dogs. For example, when hearing a baby crying, the dog's level of cortisol (a hormone released in stressful situations) tends to increase.

In addition to dogs, there is research that shows that horses and cats are capable of recognizing emotions through expression and sound. Therefore, it would be interesting to investigate the responses of each species to human emotions.

The researchers also point out that it is important to take into account cultural and contextual differences, studying not only dogs from Western, industrialized, rich and democratic countries, which are part of the sample in most studies.

“We can only really understand dogs if we can understand their emotional life”, points out Natalia about the importance of articles that study dogs’ perception of human expressions.

The research was funded by the São Paulo State Research Support Foundation (Fapesp) and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

(To Journal of USP)

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