Dogs can read emotion in human faceExcerpts from the above website
"Dogs are the only animals that can read emotion in faces much like humans, cementing their position as man's best friend, claim scientists.
When humans look at a new face their eyes tend to wander left, falling on the right hand side of the person's face first.This "left gaze bias" only occurs when we encounter faces and does not apply any other time, such as when inspecting animals or inanimate objects. A possible reason for the tendency is that the right side of the human face is better at expressing emotional state.
Researchers at the University of Lincoln have now shown that pet dogs also exhibit "left gaze bias", but only when looking at human faces. No other animal has been known to display this behaviour before.
A team led by Dr
Kun Guo showed 17 dogs images of human, dog and monkey faces as well as inanimate objects. Film of the dogs' eye and head movement revealed a strong left gaze bias when the animals were presented with human faces. But this did not occur when they were shown other images, including those of dogs. "
Guo suggests that over thousands of generations of association with humans, dogs may have evolved the left gaze bias as a way to gauge our emotions," New Scientist magazine reported.
"Recent studies show that the right side of our faces can express emotions more accurately and more intensely than the left, including anger. If true, then it makes sense for dogs - and humans - to inspect the right hand side of a face first." Surprisingly, when the dogs in the study were shown an upside-down human face, they still looked left. In contrast, humans lose their left gaze bias altogether when shown an inverted face. "
Dogs have a sense of right and wrongExcerpts from the above website
"Dogs have become more intelligent, and even learnt a sense of right and wrong, through spending time with humans, a study shows.
They possess a moral compass too, in order to negotiate the complex social world of people, adds Prof Marc
Bekoff from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
He argues that the fact that rough-and-tumble dog play rarely escalates into full-blown fighting shows that the animals abide by rules and expect others to do the same. In other words, they know right from wrong.
Dr Friederike Range from the University of Vienna, Austria, has found in experiments where one pooch was given a treat and another denied it that dogs possess a sense of fairness too, though she stresses that the data are not yet published. "Dogs show some aversion to inequity," she says. "I prefer not to call it a sense of fairness, but others might."
Akiko Takaoka from Kyoto University, Japan, played dogs recordings of unfamiliar voices - both male and female - with each voice followed by a photo of a human face on a screen. If the gender of the face did not match that of the voice, the dogs stared longer, a sign that the image did not match their expectations and yet more evidence that they have been honed to communicate with people.
Meanwhile, Dr Juliane
Kaminski at the University of Cambridge has examined how dogs can use human gestures such as pointing and gazing to find hidden food or toys and concludes that dogs do understand that we are trying to tell them something. "Domestication seems to have shaped dogs in a way which enables them to use these gestures from as early as six weeks," she tells New Scientist."
