Do Dogs Understand Smiles?

Does your dog tend to understand your emotions? If so, they are not the only ones! Recent studies from the Clever Dog Lab in Vienna shows that dogs do in fact know how we're feeling by reading our facial expressions.

Researchers tested dogs in the study using a touchscreen. The scientists trained the dogs to touch either a happy face or an angry face with their nose for a treat. The dogs were presented with either the top half or the bottom half of the faces to ensure they weren't just responding to a smile or the baring of teeth. The research team agreed that if the dogs were truly able to spot an emotion, they should be able to do so regardless of which part of the face they looked at.

Once the dogs were trained, they ran through choice trials, in which the canines had to pick between strange faces with either happy or angry expressions. The researchers presented the pooches with either the top, bottom, or left half of a face. The scientists chose the left half because previous studies found that dogs prefer to look at the left side of a face.

The pets trained to pick out happy expressions could do so when presented with different halves of a face, as well as when presented with faces they had never seen before. The dogs trained to respond to angry faces were also able to pick out angry expressions, however, it took them longer to learn their task than the dogs trained on happy faces.

It is still unclear whether a dog's ability to read a human face is a result of 15,000 years of companionship or a result of learning through experience. All of the dogs used in the study were household pets with owners who doubtlessly used facial expressions on a regular basis. Still, the findings indicate that dogs use their visual sense much more skillfully than experts thought.

Who knows what else we will discover that our four-legged friends are capable of doing. That's one of the joys of being a pet parent, our furry companions continue to amaze us every day!

Source: National Geographic & Dogster

The Human Element: Pets are People, Too

We’ve always treated our dogs and cats like a part of the family. Today, new research and experiments teach us that our pets are a lot more like us than we may think. From surprising talents to human-like brain waves, our four-legged friends are showing their skills in ways that make us proud to call them “man’s best friend.”

At the University of Pennsylvania’s Working Dog Center, researchers are going above and beyond drug and bomb-sniffing by training dogs to sniff out cancer. Dogs’ high level of olfactory smell sensors makes them the ideal candidate for this kind of training, explained Working Dog Center director Dr. Cynthia Otto, who is training three dogs to sniff out ovarian cancer in tissue samples.

Pups have been picking up the skills quickly, and the hope is that they will one day offer a non-invasive alternative for cancer screenings. Otto believes there may be something innate in dogs’ abilities to pick up on different odors, just like how wild animals tend to shun sick members of their packs in the wild.

Cats are dipping their paws into the treatment world, too. One café in Paris, Café des Chats, is offering “purr therapy” for patrons looking for a pick-me-up. Café Manager Margaux Gandelon said that she noticed the therapeutic value of cats’ company upon introducing a dozen rescue cats to her café. “Purring produces vibrations which heal, which relieve arthritis and rheumatism, which lower your blood pressure and your heartbeat,” she said. For busy Parisian residents who are unable to have pets of their own, a cup of coffee paired with a relaxing kitty snuggle at Café des Chats is just what the doctor ordered.

Doctors and scientists have spent years studying the behavior of animals to try to analyze what they are thinking. The inability to study a dog’s active brain waves left us wondering what’s really going on in our pup’s head… until now. Emory University neuroeconomics professor Gregory Berns and his colleagues have trained dogs to lie awake and unrestrained in an M.R.I scanner. An M.R.I requires the patient to be awake and completely still in order to truly study brain function. Now that these dogs are able to meet these conditions, we are able to access a never-before-seen view of what goes on in our dog’s heads.

The exciting conclusion come to by Berns was that “Dogs are people, too.” Although the studies are just beginning, they have already found many similarities between the dog and human brain. Similarities between an area of the brain called the caudet nucleus, which plays a large role in the anticipation of things that humans enjoy, were particularly striking. This early research seems to indicate the existence of canine emotions, making them more human-like than ever before.

Our pets continue to surprise us every day, from they way they seem in tune to our emotions to their many talents and skills. In what ways does YOUR pet surprise you?