ArticleAnimal cognition2024
Dogs distinguish authentic human emotions without being empathic.
Article in Animal cognition, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Dog brain representations of human facial expressions: Encoding happiness and differentiating specific negative expressions.iScience · 2026Article
- Dogs display context-dependent behavioral responses to subtle owner-derived multimodal stimuli.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Article
- Differences in dogs' and wolves' human-directed greeting behaviour: facial expressions, body language, and the problem of human biases.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Let's talk about "talking" dogs! Reviewing the science behind a bold idea.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- Not just avoidance: dogs show subtle individual differences in reacting to human fear chemosignals.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Several recent studies have investigated how dogs perceive human emotional expressions. They have measured the reactions of dogs when exposed to stimuli presented in different modalities, such as photographs, audio recordings or odor samples, or to humans simulating various emotional situations. In the current study, dog owners were manipulated to genuinely experience emotions of happiness, sadness, and neutrality. We measured how dogs responded to their owners' authentic emotions in two different natural situations: induction of the emotion through a video clip and training of a new task. Through a detailed analysis of dog behavior in these naturalistic settings, we investigated whether dogs show behavioral responses to genuine human emotions. We found that dogs behaved differently depending on the owner's emotional state: they gazed and jumped less at owners when they were sad, and their compliance with the 'sit' command was also diminished. When owners were happy, dogs performed better in the trained task. These results are discussed in light of how dogs perceive human emotional expressions and the adaptive value of this skill.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.