Who’s a good face reader?

New research shows dogs can distinguish between several different human facial expressions, providing new evidence for something pet owners have long suspected: They’re pretty good at reading the room.

Put on a happy face

In a newly published study, researchers showed eight dogs photos of strangers with happy facial expressions, while scanning their brains for data.

• They found that dogs process faces much like humans do, focusing on eyes, noses, and mouths for clues as to emotion.
• They also discovered that human faces activated the dogs’ temporal cortex and caudate nucleus, two regions of the brain associated with higher cognitive and reward processing.

Scientists then expanded their experiment, showing a group of 12 dogs various photos of humans displaying happiness, anger, fear, and sadness while scanning their brains.

The areas associated with cognitive and reward processing responded only to happy human faces, suggesting that dogs’ brains process positive human expressions differently from negative ones.

A further whole-brain analysis revealed distinct patterns of activity when dogs viewed angry, fearful, and sad faces, implying their brains were categorizing each emotion differently rather than simply sorting human expressions into “good” and “bad” buckets.

Bottom line: "Humans are really good at picking up small details on the face, and so are dogs," study author Raúl Hernández-Pérez told BBC.