Abstract
Over the recent years, the study of emotional functioning has become one of the central issues in dog cognition. Previous studies showed that dogs can recognize different emotions by looking at human faces and can correctly match the human emotional state with a vocalization having a negative emotional valence. However, to this day, little is known about how dogs perceive and process human non-verbal vocalizations having different emotional valence. The current research provides new insights into emotional functioning of the canine brain by studying dogs’ lateralized auditory functions (to provide a first insight into the valence dimension) matched with both behavior and physiological measures of arousal (to study the arousal dimension) in response to playbacks related to the Ekman’s six basic human emotions. Overall, our results indicate lateralized brain patterns for the processing of human emotional vocalizations, with the prevalent use of the right hemisphere in the analysis of vocalizations with a clear negative emotional valence (i.e. “fear” and “sadness”) and the prevalent use of the left hemisphere in the analysis of positive vocalization (“happiness”). Furthermore, both cardiac activity and behavior response support the hypothesis that dogs are sensitive to emotional cues of human vocalizations.
Highlights
Evolutionary and ontogenetic processes played a pivotal role in dogs’ ability to detect social information from human behavior, providing the basis for complex forms of interspecific social communication[1,2]
Regarding the auditory sensory domain, it has been reported that dogs recognize the different valences of positive and negative emotional sounds, showing an increase of indicators for arousal and negative emotional states in response to negative emotional sounds compared to positive ones[10]
Considering that it has been reported that the six basic emotions universally inferred from facial expressions[12] are cross-culturally recognized from vocal signals in humans[13], our study aimed at investigating if dogs are able to recognize the six basic emotions expressed by human non-verbal vocalizations
Summary
Evolutionary and ontogenetic processes played a pivotal role in dogs’ ability to detect social information from human behavior, providing the basis for complex forms of interspecific social communication[1,2]. Dogs are able to interpret human communicative gestures (e.g. the direction in which humans are facing or gazing), to detect his attentional states[3,4] and to recognize different emotions by looking at human faces 5,6. Regarding the auditory sensory domain, it has been reported that dogs recognize the different valences of positive (laughing) and negative (crying) emotional sounds, showing an increase of indicators for arousal and negative emotional states in response to negative emotional sounds compared to positive ones[10]. Further studies are required in order to set reliable behavior indicators for positive emotional states in dogs. In order to investigate this issue, we used the head-orienting paradigm to evaluate the potential asymmetrical behavior responses of dogs to human emotional vocalizations. Hemisphere in processing the acoustic stimulus (e.g. if the subject turns his head towards the speaker with the right ear leading, the acoustic input is processed primarily by the left hemisphere, or at least in the initial attention to the stimulus[14,15,16])
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