Can dogs tell when we are happy, sad, or angry? As a dog owner, I feel confident not only that I can tell what kind of emotional state my pets are in, but also that they respond to my emotions. Yet as a hard-headed scientist, I try to take a more rational and pragmatic view. These personal observations seem more likely to result from my desire for a good relationship with my dogs.
The problem is that studying emotional interpretations and responses across two interacting species is very difficult. For one thing, you can’t ask a dog how it’s feeling. So while many people can describe how their dogs respond to their emotional states— typically in ways we humans consider appropriate and perhaps even desirable—scientific evidence and explanation for this ability has mostly been elusive.
However, a new study, published in the journal Biology Letters, suggests that dogs really can recognize emotions in both humans and other dogs using visual and audio cues. Scientists have already documented chimpanzees’ and Rhesus macaques’ ability to identify emotional states among their own kind. But this is the first study to demonstrate that any animal can tell how members of another species are feeling.
