By Christine Horba and Akrivi Christopoulou (B class)

Dog owners will not be surprised to learn that man’s best friend can tell what mood they are in by looking at their face. A recent study has discovered that dogs look at their owner’s faces for sings of anger, sadness, or happiness in exactly the same way as we do to other people.

The scientists involved in the study believe dogs have developed these face reading skills over thousands of generations as a means of avoiding an unwelcome kick or slap from their owner. Dogs look at the human’s face differently from any other image and the way they process the information that they see is dealt with in the same way a human would deal with it.

Research has revealed that human faces are one-sided when it comes to showing emotion. Feelings such as anger, pleasure, and fright show much more clearly on the right-hand side of our faces than on the left. This is believed to be because the right side of a face is controlled by the left part of the brain, which deals with emotions.

Normally when people meet someone for the first time, they tend to look left and they watch the right-hand side of the face. This is called ‘left-gaze bias’ and has been proved time and time again experiments. It is now believed that dogs do the same thing and look at the right-hand side of their owner’s face.

To carry out the research, scientists showed seventeen dogs pictures of people, other dogs, monkeys, and objects, and filmed the dogs’ head and eye movements. They found that when the dogs looked at pictures of anything but a human, their eyes moved evenly across the picture, but when presented with a picture of a human, their eyes moved to the left, just as a human’s would. No other animal tested has shown this response to pictures of anything, so dogs are unique in this respect.

It was also discovered that dogs look to the left much more when shown a picture of someone who is angry rather than happy or sad. This would suggest that it is important for a dog to work out a human’s mood quickly and accurately when a human is angry, and therefore more likely to hit out at the dog. Surprisingly, when the dogs were shown pictures of an upside-down human face, they still looked to the left, whereas humans lose the left-gaze bias when in the same situation.