You and Your Dog Share a Language: The Feelings Written on Your Faces
Dogs,
as anyone who’s ever shared a home with one knows, are often uncannily
adept at reading human emotions. Most dog owners have some story or
another of a time their pet just seemed to know that they were
feeling sad and were in need of a good cuddle. Consider Zeus, a small
fluffball who noted his owner’s tears and — according to his owner’s
telling — brought her an odd little gift to cheer her up.
Some recent studies are now providing empirical evidence to support these sorts of owner anecdotes. Dogs really do seem to be especially skilled at picking up on what people are feeling; one study
published earlier this year even suggests that dogs can recognize a
person’s emotions by looking at his or her facial expressions. And,
really, why shouldn’t they be able to do so? Humans and dogs have
co-evolved over many thousands of years (some theorize that the
human-canine bond began 16,000 years ago; others say it’s more like
30,000). It makes sense that during that time, we’d have established
some form of cross-species communication. As the studies are piling up,
it seems like a huge piece of that common language are our expressions —
that is, our ability to read the emotions written on each others’ faces.
Dogs,
at least, are uncommonly skilled at reading people’s faces. But how
skilled are people at reading the faces of dogs? In recent years, a
handful of researchers have begun an attempt to increase human
understanding of that shared language, by improving the accuracy with
which people read dogs’ facial expressions. You may have heard of the
Facial Action Coding System, a project that began in earnest in the late
1970s to taxonomize all the expressions a human face can make. This is
like that, only for dogs.
“The literature so far is about dogs understanding human expressions,”
Juliane Kaminski of the University of Portsmouth told Science of Us.
“We’re sort of turning that around.”
Research
in DogFACS only began a few years ago, but scientists have so far
identified 11 action units (AUs) — that is, movements of facial muscles
involved in expressions. They’ve also noted five Ear Action Descriptors
(EADs), because ear movements are also an important part of dogs’ facial
expressions. So that’s 16 independent facial and ear movements, which
sometimes appear solo and sometimes combine to form distinct facial
expressions. The point of FACS in dogs and humans (and apes and cats and horses, for that matter, all of which have their own FACS)
is to have an objective way to describe what a face is doing, something
that becomes incredibly important when studying animals to avoid unfounded anthropomorphism.
“We
have the same problem as studies of human faces — we tend to interpret,
but not describe,” Kaminski said. People say that dogs look sad, or
happy, or guilty — but how many of these assessments come from a human
point of view, instead of the dog’s? To get around that problem, “you
need an objective tool, which we now have,” Kaminski said. The next
step: to use DogFACS to catalogue canine facial expressions in a variety
of different contexts. “As soon as we see there are certain facial
movements that we always see in certain contexts, then we can
say things like, ‘It’s probably because they’re scared.’ But the problem
starts when we follow our own preferences in describing dog behavior.”
So far, there has been just one study
published that places DogFACS in a real-life context (but is it ever a
good one). In an experiment, Kaminsky and her colleagues filmed 27 dogs
at a shelter, recording their interactions with a stranger. The
researchers also acquired adoption information from that shelter, so
that they could track how quickly each of those dogs found homes. Only
one facial expression correlated with speed of adoption — what the
scientists call AU101, the code for a raising of the inner eyebrows. In plain English, you might call this puppy-dog eyes.
Not
only was this the only expression to correlate with faster rates of
adoption — the dogs who made that face more often during the brief
filmed interaction found homes the fastest. If, for instance, in that
two-minute interaction caught on camera, the dog made puppy-dog eyes
five times, he stayed in the shelter for about 50 more days on average;
if he made the face ten times, it was 35 more days in the shelter; if he
made it 15 times, he’d be out of the shelter in an average of 28 days.
It is not hard to imagine why this happened. That inner raised eyebrow just makes dogs look so sad, as if they are desperate for human companionship and care; it also makes their eyes look larger, and therefore more infant-like.
“It’s a ‘You look like an infant baby, here, I’ll protect you,’ kind of
thing,” Kaminski explained. “It’s you just look so cute, I can’t help
it.” The next question, then, is whether dogs are making this face on
purpose, because they’ve evolved to learn the power of cute to
weaken human resolve. “So now what we’re looking at is — is this a
communicative signal? Do they produce it in any way intentionally — do
they produce it to manipulate us?” Kaminski said.
Along
with the puppy-dog eyes, these researchers also want to investigate the
“guilty look,” or the face your dog makes when you get home and find
your favorite shoes have been used as chew toys. Is it truly a look of
guilt — as in, the dog knows he’s done something wrong? Or is it a
reaction to their human companion’s angry face? (Research by Alexandra Horowitz of Barnard College, for example, has suggested that it’s likely the latter.)
These
misunderstandings matter. Children in particular, Kaminski said, tend
to mistake a dog’s bared teeth for a “smile,” which is often the reason
kids end up getting bitten by dogs when they try to zoom in for a hug.
(Your periodic reminder: Dogs hate hugs.)
For example, to a kid, it could kind of look like the dog below is
smiling. To the researchers who study DogFACS, this expression is the
painstakingly unemotional combination of AU110 (upper-lip raised), AU109 (nose wrinkled), and AU116 (lower-lip depressed), as Catia Caeiro of the University of Lincoln explained in an email to Science of Us.
It’s not that these expressions don’t work
in tandem with dogs’ emotions — rather, the scientists behind Dog FACS
are trying to untangle anthropomorphic assumptions from the expressions,
observing what sorts of situations tend to trigger each face.
Eventually, emotions and expressions can be knitted together again. For
now, however, Kaminski has some advice for people who wish to better
understand what their dogs are trying to say through their faces. “It’s
completely fine to follow your intuition,” she said. “If the bond is
there, that’s based on this special relationship and this special
history we have with dogs.” Scientists like Kaminski are learning the
intricacies of this shared language. But people who love their dogs
likely already get the gist.
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