Dogs can infer implicit information from human emotional expressions

Abstract

The ability to infer emotional states and their wider consequences requires the establishment of relationships between the emotional display and subsequent actions. These abilities, together with the use of emotional information from others in social decision making, are cognitively demanding and require inferential skills that extend beyond the immediate perception of the current behaviour of another individual. They may include predictions of the significance of the emotional states being expressed. These abilities were previously believed to be exclusive to primates. In this study, we presented adult domestic dogs with a social interaction between two unfamiliar people, which could be positive, negative or neutral. After passively witnessing the actors engaging silently with each other and with the environment, dogs were given the opportunity to approach a food resource that varied in accessibility. We found that the available emotional information was more relevant than the motivation of the actors (i.e. giving something or receiving something) in predicting the dogs' responses. Thus, dogs were able to access implicit information from the actors' emotional states and appropriately use the affective information to make context-dependent decisions. The findings demonstrate that a non-human animal can actively acquire information from emotional expressions, infer some form of emotional state and use this functionally to make decisions.

Keywords: Canis familiaris; Decision-making; Emotions; Social behaviour; Social cognition.

Fig. 1

Schematic view of the experimental setting. The set up consisted of a table, two actors positioned next to it, the experimenter, the owner and the dog. Every owner stood in the same area of the room, which was marked on the floor and indicated to them prior to the experiment. The behaviour of the subjects was recorded with two digital video cameras (camera 1 and camera 2), which registered their responses from different angles

Fig. 2

Relationship between dog behaviour towards the different actors (neutral actor—graphs 0.1 or the emotional actor—graphs 0.2), emotional condition (happy or angry) and food accessibility (direct or indirect). Within each graph, the Y-axis refers to the behavioural category and the X-axis refers to the emotional condition (positive on the left, i.e. happy, and negative on the right, i.e. angry). Results are presented as mean relative duration with 95% confidence interval for gazing (A), body orientation—“direction” (B), looking (C), position in the room—“position” (D) and sniffing (E). We found no significant interactions between factors. The horizontal and vertical bars indicate where significant effects were found: *p ≤ 0.05; **p ≤ 0.01; ***p ≤ 0.001