Abstract
Age-related changes in the brain can alter how emotions are processed. In humans, valence specific changes in attention and memory were reported with increasing age, i.e. older people are less attentive toward and experience fewer negative emotions, while processing of positive emotions remains intact. Little is yet known about this “positivity effect” in non-human animals. We tested young (n = 21, 1–5 years) and old (n = 19, >10 years) family dogs with positive (laugh), negative (cry), and neutral (hiccup, cough) human vocalisations and investigated age-related differences in their behavioural reactions. Only dogs with intact hearing were analysed and the selected sound samples were balanced regarding mean and fundamental frequencies between valence categories. Compared to young dogs, old individuals reacted slower only to the negative sounds and there was no significant difference in the duration of the reactions between groups. The selective response of the aged dogs to the sound stimuli suggests that the results cannot be explained by general cognitive and/or perceptual decline. and supports the presence of an age-related positivity effect in dogs, too. Similarities in emotional processing between humans and dogs may imply analogous changes in subcortical emotional processing in the canine brain during ageing.
Highlights
IntroductionValence specific changes in attention and memory were reported with increasing age, i.e. older people are less attentive toward and experience fewer negative emotions, while processing of positive emotions remains intact
Age-related changes in the brain can alter how emotions are processed
We compared latency to react and the latency of recovery of aged and young dogs with intact hearing. Via this setup we investigated whether aged dogs were (1) less responsive to all sounds in general due to e.g. general cognitive decline or (2) selectively less responsive toward negative stimuli than young dogs corresponding to a positivity effect
Summary
Valence specific changes in attention and memory were reported with increasing age, i.e. older people are less attentive toward and experience fewer negative emotions, while processing of positive emotions remains intact. Whereas the processing of positive emotions remains more or less stable, older adults experience fewer negative emotions This phenomenon, referred to as age-related positivity effect, is present both in attention and memory[2]. Emotion processing was tested in the head turning paradigm, where dogs reacted differently towards positive and negative sounds. This supports that dogs spontaneously discriminate between positive and negative human emotions. Using a non-invasive functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) procedure with awake dogs and humans, Andics et al.[27] showed the existence of specific voice areas and the presence of emotional valence sensitivity in dogs’ brains
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