Have you ever felt that your pet dogs can read your minds? It appears to be so, as most recent study proved that the man's best friend can genuinely understand positive and negative human emotions.
But how come they can do it? It seems that dogs aren't merely dogs. Truth be told, Bustle recently reported that a group of animal behavior experts and psychologist coming from University of Lincoln in U.K., and the University of São Paulo in Brazil recently conducted a study, wherein it involved 17 untrained pooches that were presented with images and audio associated with certain emotions.
"It revealed that when the pictures and sounds matched the same emotion, dogs would spend longer looking at the human's facial expressions. The research also demonstrates that dogs can create mental images of positive and negative feelings," according to The Linc.
Subsequently, the study was distributed in the Royal Society journal "Biology Letters," demonstrating how dogs can shape their own comprehension of a man's enthusiastic state through their facial expression and voice.
On the other hand, the said reports apparently comes as no surprise to vast majority of pet lovers from all across the globe. Be that as it may, this study was reportedly the first study to find that dogs also listen to human's manner of speaking, in order for them to comprehend more human's emotions.
"Previous studies have indicated that dogs can differentiate between human emotions from cues such as facial expressions, but this is not the same as emotional recognition," said Dr. Kun Guo, Lincoln's School of Psychology, as noted by Korea Portal.
"Our study shows that dogs have the ability to integrate two different sources of sensory information into a coherent perception of emotion in both humans and dogs," he clarified. "To do so requires a system of internal categorization of emotional states. This cognitive ability has until now only been evidenced in primates and the capacity to do this across species only seen in humans."
However, it is also worth noting that the pooches responded more unmistakably to the dog stimuli than the human stimuli.
Nevertheless, man's best friend apparently just acts tough but deep inside; they can also feel empathy, just like humans.