London : People with higher emotional empathy evaluate the facial expressions of both dogs and other humans more quickly and intensely, a new study has found. Researchers at University of Helsinki and Aalto University in Finland explored how empathy and other psychological factors affect people’s assessments of the facial images of dogs and humans.
The results show for the first time that human empathy, or the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences, also affects perceptions of the facial expressions of pet dogs.
“Empathy affected assessments of dogs’ facial expressions even more than previous experience of dogs, probably because the face is a biologically important stimulus for humans. Our earlier studies have showed, however, that when considering the entire body language of dogs, previous experience of dogs increases in importance,” said postdoctoral researcher Miiamaaria Kujala.
Based on previous results, the researchers knew that people with higher emotional empathy evaluated other people’s expressions more quickly, accurately and often also more intensely.
“Empathy speeds up and intensifies the assessment of dogs’ facial expressions, but defining the accuracy of such assessments is currently unreliable,” Kujala said. Communication based on facial expressions has been studied in social mammals for decades.
Darwin was already able to perceive similarities in mammals’ expressions, but it has taken until the present day for researchers to begin to understand similarities between the emotional expressions of different species.
Researchers has previously demonstrated that dogs clearly recognise the threatening expressions of both humans and other dogs.
On the other hand, people may find it difficult to recognise happiness in dogs based on their facial expressions. This is shows by the fact that people experienced in dog training estimated the happy expressions of dogs as happier than others did. – PTI
