NEW DELHI: A new study has found that dogs may be able to distinguish between a range of human emotions just by looking at their faces, offering fresh insight into how animals developed their remarkable capacity to understand people.
Researchers at the University of Vienna used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record the brain activity of 12 trained pet dogs. The animals were made to look at photographs of people displaying different emotions which included happiness, anger, fear and sadness. The study was published in the Cell Press journal iScience, on 10 August, 2026.
The researchers first examined how dogs responded to happy and neutral human faces. Out of the twelve, eight dogs took part in this experiment. Happy faces triggered increased activity in the temporal cortex, a region involved in processing information, with activity extending into the caudate nucleus, which is associated with reward processing.
“The activity in the caudate nucleus is particularly interesting,” said Laura Cuaya, senior author of the study at the University of Vienna. “It suggests that happy human faces may have emotional significance for dogs.”
The researchers then examined whether the same brain regions responded to other emotions. The analysis revealed distinct patterns of brain activity for specific negative emotions. The dogs’ brains exhibited patterns that enabled researchers to differentiate fear from anger and sadness.
What the Findings Don’t Show
This does not mean dogs experience emotions in exactly the same way humans do. Nor does it mean that facial expressions are the only way dogs interpret human emotions. In everyday situations, dogs also rely on body language, tone of voice and smell to understand people.
“Humans are really good at picking up small details on the face, and so are dogs,” said Raúl Hernández-Pérez, first author of the study at the University of Vienna. “This makes dogs very interesting. By studying their brains, we can understand what adaptations have developed to support their remarkable social and emotional understanding of humans.”
The researchers said the findings provide evidence that dogs have specialised neural mechanisms for processing human facial expressions. They now plan to investigate how dogs combine facial expressions with other signals, such as voices and body language, to understand human emotions.
The researchers also hope to compare how human and dog brains process the same emotional signals, potentially offering further insight into the social relationship between the two species.
(Edited by Maryam Hassan)