Abstract
Sensitivity to the emotions of others provides clear biological advantages. However, in the case of heterospecific relationships, such as that existing between dogs and humans, there are additional challenges since some elements of the expression of emotions are species-specific. Given that faces provide important visual cues for communicating emotional state in both humans and dogs, and that processing of emotions is subject to brain lateralisation, we investigated lateral gaze bias in adult dogs when presented with pictures of expressive human and dog faces. Our analysis revealed clear differences in laterality of eye movements in dogs towards conspecific faces according to the emotional valence of the expressions. Differences were also found towards human faces, but to a lesser extent. For comparative purpose, a similar experiment was also run with 4-year-old children and it was observed that they showed differential processing of facial expressions compared to dogs, suggesting a species-dependent engagement of the right or left hemisphere in processing emotions.
Highlights
Being sensitive to other’s emotions provides a clear biological advantage in the form of harm avoidance, access to resources or facilitation of group cohesion
In order to assess dogs’ sensitivity to both dog and human facial communication, we examined their visual lateralisation towards the facial expressions of both species associated with different emotional valence [negative, neutral and positive]
The present study is the first of its kind demonstrating differential brain lateralisation in processing facial expressions associated with distinct emotional valence in a nonhuman species
Summary
Being sensitive to other’s emotions provides a clear biological advantage in the form of harm avoidance, access to resources or facilitation of group cohesion. As facial communication is largely suggested to be an adaptation to a complex social life [3,9], a specialized system dedicated to facial communication should be found in other social mammalian species In this respect, social canids are known to present a large range of facial expressions [9,10]; the way they process them has not been empirically investigated yet. An accurate processing of other species’ facial emotions could be advantageous in inter-specific co-habitation, such as occurs between dogs and humans, it could be challenged by the species-specificity of some signals, which would prevent animals from relying on simple homologies, between distant animal taxa
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