Dog owners everywhere are most likely familiar with the adorable gaze of their loving furry friends. But as convincing as puppy eyes can be, they might not solely be a sign that your puppy wants something from you.
The saying that dogs are man’s best friend is perpetuated in a recent study conducted by British researchers, who claim that a dog’s facial expressions simply mirror those of his or her owner.
The research focused on the muscle that controls the inner part of a dog’s brows and makes its eyes appear bigger, therefore contributing to the puppy eyes look.
Movement of this muscle was studied under a variety of circumstances, such as whether an individual paid the dog any attention or whether the individual was holding any food.
The results of the study concluded that the dogs displayed more facial expressions, barking and sticking out their tongues when they received attention, regardless of food.
The research was led by Juliane Kaminski, a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth in England.
“This simply shows that dogs produce more (but not different) facial movements when someone is looking at them,’ Kaminski wrote in an email to The New York Times.
However, despite this physical interaction, Kaminski makes it a point that it is still not possible to interpret any specific emotional meaning from a dog’s facial movement.
Nonetheless, the findings did debunk the common myth that dogs use their puppy eyes to obtain something, since the studied muscle showed no reaction in the isolated presence of food.
Brian Hare, a professor and the director of the canine cognition center at Duke University, deems this a good thing for owners to know: Dogs have attachment that goes beyond being fed.
“This is a delightful finding that provides more evidence of how dogs draw us closer to them with their eyes,” Hare wrote in an email to The New York Times. “This research shows that the facial expressions that we find attractive in dogs are made when we can see them — not when we are wandering around the kitchen looking for a treat for them.”
The expressive behavior of dogs in interactions is not one-sided, since humans likewise have involuntary responses to their pets.
“When we’re interacting with our dogs, we’re not totally in control of how we view them and the opinion we have of them... It really mirrors how our interactions occur with our own species,” Hare wrote.
The results of this study reject the idea that the facial expressions observed in animals are not a form of communication but rather unconscious movements reflective of internal sentiments.
Bridget Waller, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Portsmouth and another author of this study, explains that humans often associate facial expressions with emotion. In particular, an animal’s facial expressions are quite fixed and not malleable based on circumstances.
“[The research] tells us that their facial expressions are probably responsive to humans — not just to other dogs... [That] tells us something about how domestication has shaped [dogs], and that it has changed them in order to be more communicative with humans, in a sense,” Waller said, according to The Guardian.
This study is one of several recent attempts to make sense of the relationship between man and dog.
In another study, researchers concluded that dogs respond to a difference in intonation and word choice. Both factors had to be positive to properly convey a sense of reward to canines.
Such studies allow for a deeper understanding of the interaction among different species and provide a pathway for beginning to think about the way in which the brains of other organisms function.
