Paws And Feelings: Brain Scans Show Dogs Can Tell Fear From Sadness

Vienna, August 13, 2026: Dogs often react differently to people depending on their emotional state, perhaps moving away from someone who appears angry while quietly approaching a person who is crying. Research has already established that dogs have emotions and can respond to human feelings, abilities that may have helped them successfully live alongside people.

New research published in the journal iScience has now examined whether dogs can distinguish between different negative human emotions, such as anger, fear and sadness. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), researchers found evidence that dogs’ brains process some human facial expressions differently.

Dogs Are Sensitive To Human Expressions

Dogs pay close attention to human faces. Previous research has shown that they look longer at emotional facial expressions and respond differently to emotional sounds compared with neutral ones.

However, scientists were unsure whether dogs simply categorised human emotions broadly as “good mood” and “bad mood”, or whether they recognised different emotional expressions as distinct signals.

The new study, led by University of Vienna neuroscientist Raúl Hernández-Pérez and colleagues, investigated this question by scanning pet dogs’ brains using MRI while the animals viewed photographs of human faces.

Building on their earlier research, the scientists found evidence that dogs process images depicting different human emotional expressions in distinct ways.

Brain Regions Respond Differently To Fear

Using machine learning to analyse activity across the dogs’ brains, researchers found that different brain regions were involved in distinguishing fear from sadness and fear from anger.

The right rostral suprasylvian gyrus was activated when distinguishing between fear and sadness. Fear and anger, meanwhile, were differentiated through activity in the right mid ectosylvian gyrus and left splenial gyrus.

The analysis did not detect differences in the brain areas activated when dogs viewed images showing human anger and sadness. Fear, however, stood apart from the other negative emotions.

Fear May Demand A Faster Response

One possible explanation is that fear and anger attract dogs’ attention more strongly than sadness.

Other research has found that dogs respond more quickly to fear and anger and show stronger physical reactions, including an increased heart rate. Such expressions may require dogs to react rapidly to protect themselves.

Sadness, by contrast, is less likely to represent an immediate threat to dogs living alongside humans, reducing the urgency of their response. Some dogs also do not display the heroic Lassie-like behaviour people might hope for when humans are distressed.

The new research involved relatively small numbers of animals, with eight and 12 dogs taking part across the two components of the study. Nevertheless, it provides the first MRI-based proof-of-concept evidence that dogs’ brains can distinguish between two human facial expressions representing different negative emotions.

The findings suggest dogs’ neural representation of human emotion goes beyond a straightforward “good/bad” distinction.

Emotion Processing Involves A Brain Network

The findings also indicate that recognising emotions in others, including across species, does not depend on a single “emotion centre” in the brain.

In dogs, humans and other animal species, emotion perception instead involves a network of brain regions working together as part of social life.

The researchers, however, noted that showing dogs still photographs of people is a human-centred way of investigating how the animals understand emotional states.

Dogs inhabit sensory environments in which smell and the sound of human speech can also communicate emotions and influence their responses.

Dogs Learn About Humans Through Their Senses

Even wolves raised around humans have been found to respond to the odour of human fear in a similar way to dogs. This underscores the importance of learning, rather than attributing such responses solely to evolutionary differences in canid bodies or their interactions with people.

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Dogs continually learn about humans through their interactions with them. They observe, smell and listen to human emotional signals, learn how those cues predict people’s behaviour towards them and use that information to live alongside humans harmoniously.

Understanding more about how dogs communicate their own emotions could, in turn, help people better understand the animals with which they share their lives.

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