Dogs recognize dog and human emotions

The perception of emotional expressions allows animals to evaluate the social intentions and motivations of each other. This usually takes place within species; however, in the case of domestic dogs, it might be advantageous to recognize the emotions of humans as well as other dogs. In this sense, the combination of visual and auditory cues to categorize others' emotions facilitates the information processing and indicates high-level cognitive representations. Using a cross-modal preferential looking paradigm, we presented dogs with either human or dog faces with different emotional valences (happy/playful versus angry/aggressive) paired with a single vocalization from the same individual with either a positive or negative valence or Brownian noise. Dogs looked significantly longer at the face whose expression was congruent to the valence of vocalization, for both conspecifics and heterospecifics, an ability previously known only in humans. These results demonstrate that dogs can extrac...情绪表情感知能力可帮助动物评估同类间的社交意图与动机。此类感知通常局限于同一物种内部；但对于家犬来说，同时识别人类与其他同类的情绪或许具有演化优势。从这一角度来看，结合视觉与听觉线索对互动对象的情绪进行分类，能够优化信息处理流程，并反映出高阶认知表征能力。本研究采用跨模态优先注视范式（cross-modal preferential looking paradigm），向家犬展示带有不同情绪效价（emotional valences）的人类或犬类面部表情（愉悦/嬉戏与愤怒/攻击性两类），同时搭配来自同一发声个体的正性、负性效价发声，或是布朗噪声（Brownian noise）。实验结果显示，无论是面对同种个体（conspecifics）还是异种个体（heterospecifics），家犬注视与发声效价一致的面部表情的时长均显著更长——此种能力此前仅在人类中被证实。上述研究结果表明，家犬能够提取……