It’s Friday, and it also happens to be a glorious day in which we are able to reaffirm that All Dogs Everywhere, Of All Time‘s status as the single greatest species on Earth. Blessed to have loyal best friends, etc.
In a study published today in Current Biology, a group of scientists concluded that dogs are able to discriminate between human emotions, as tested by presenting positive and negative facial expressions to a sample of (mostly) border collies. Such genius, so intelligence.
The study saw two groups of dogs become trained to react to “happy” and “sad” human faces on a touch screen – the dogs were, according to The Verge, able to correctly select the determined expression with an accuracy of 70-80%. Go dogs! Maybe anyone out there who has had the good fortune of ever meeting or hell, petting a doge, will have already figured out that dogs have a handy knack at figuring out if you’re feeling like total poop. But having the comfort of science! backing this up feels like the kind of shoutout dogs deserve.
I know exactly what I’m doing, and I feel you, say dogs everywhere.
The study also took into account variables of the facial expressions—dogs may have just been using teeth as a cue to detect a smiling expression—so further tests involving isolation of human faces, such as the eyes, were used.”They seemed to realize that the smiley eyes have the same meaning as a smiley mouth and angry eyes have the same meaning as an angry mouth,” one of the authors of the study, Corsin Müller said. Dogs can officially detect human smize, which renders my spirit officially obliterated by ungodly levels of happiness flooding my soul.
The study’s abstract, which you can find here, also reveals that the group found dogs were using their memory to help discern and understand human facial expressions, saying, “We conclude that the dogs used their memories of real emotional human faces to accomplish the discrimination task.”
Via The Verge.
Brilliant lead image by Yasuyoshi Chiba via Getty.
