title: Dogs recognize dog and human emotions.
abstract: The perception of emotional expressions allows animals to evaluate the social intentions and motivations of each other. This usually takes place within species; however, in the case of domestic dogs, it might be advantageous to recognize the emotions of humans as well as other dogs. In this sense, the combination of visual and auditory cues to categorize others' emotions facilitates the information processing and indicates high-level cognitive representations. Using a cross-modal preferential looking paradigm, we presented dogs with either human or dog faces with different emotional valences (happy/playful versus angry/aggressive) paired with a single vocalization from the same individual with either a positive or negative valence or Brownian noise. Dogs looked significantly longer at the face whose expression was congruent to the valence of vocalization, for both conspecifics and heterospecifics, an ability previously known only in humans. These results demonstrate that dogs can extract and integrate bimodal sensory emotional information, and discriminate between positive and negative emotions from both humans and dogs.
authors.affiliation: School of Life Sciences, University of Lincoln, Lincoln LN6 7DL, UK Department of Experimental Psychology, Institute of Psychology, University of São Paulo, São Paulo 05508-030, Brazil.
authors.forename: Natalia
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Albuquerque
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Lincoln, Lincoln LN6 7DL, UK kguo@lincoln.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Kun
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6765-1957
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Guo
authors.affiliation: School of Life Sciences, University of Lincoln, Lincoln LN6 7DL, UK.
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Wilkinson
authors.affiliation: Department of Public Politics and Public Health, Federal University of São Paulo, Santos 11015-020, Brazil.
authors.forename: Carine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Savalli
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, Institute of Psychology, University of São Paulo, São Paulo 05508-030, Brazil.
authors.forename: Emma
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Otta
authors.affiliation: School of Life Sciences, University of Lincoln, Lincoln LN6 7DL, UK.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Mills
mesh_terms: D000786:Anger; D000818:Animals; D003463:Cues; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D004285:Dogs / Q000523:psychology*; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013060:Speech; D014828:Vocalization, Animal
keywords: Canis familiaris; cross-modal sensory integration; emotion recognition; social cognition