Mellow Milo or rage Rover: You can tell your dog’s mood from his face

Professor Harris Friedman from the University of Florida and Harvard University and Tina Bloom, a researcher at the Floraglades Foundation, have been studying the facial expressions of dogs since 2012. They have published four studies since.

Bloom has trained police dogs since 1989. She was convinced that if emotions in vocalisations of animals could be studied,those in visual parameters such as facial expressions could be too. But no one bought the idea in 2006, while she was working on her dissertation in comparative psychology at Walden University. “It was a long hard row to hoe, because not one psychologist in the department believed that dogs actually had facial expressions” she says. “I had to excise photographs of my own dog’s face and do a pilot study with fellow students to be able to begin.”

In the September study, 120 human participants across Brazil were asked to view photographs of three breeds: the Belgian Malinois; the cropped-eared, black Doberman; and the floppy-eared Rhodesian Ridgeback. The dogs were photographed while eliciting responses such as anger by using a leaf blower, fear by showing them toenail trimmers, joy by tossing a ball to play, and sadness by reprimanding them. The participants were then divided into two groups and made to describe the dog’s emotions using two-word choices or four-word choices by viewing pictures of just their eyes.

The majority (61.94%) of participants accurately recognised emotions from pictures of the dog’s eyes, and at a much higher rate than they would by chance. Fear was the easiest emotion to spot. “When dogs are afraid, they open their eyes and expose the sclera, a conspicuous signal,” states the study. “For centuries, many Western scientists have claimed that dogs do not feel, and therefore, we can do heinous experimentation on them,” says Bloom. “I hope our work improves the lives of dogs and helps people understand just how much they do feel and communicate with us.”

In their previous studies, the researchers also found that participants could accurately recognise facial expressions which were harder to identify such as disgust (51%) and surprise (49%). Bloom explains that there’s a popular misconception about how “tough dogs” like police dogs do not show fear because they are trained to be aggressive. “The toughest of police dogs have soft spots for their loved ones, and when exposed to painful tasks like having their toenails clipped, they will express fear,” she says.

Next, the researchers are looking at investigating how to factor in the shape of a dog’s face while identifying emotions. For example, wolves have short, erect ears, light eyes, a larger skull-to-muzzle length ratio. Unlike dogs, they do not have the muscles that move the eyebrows. “We will be studying the Siberian Husky, which seems to be a transition between ‘wolf’ and ‘dog’ in that ancient breeds have wider skulls, shorter muzzles, shorter ears, and often are missing the muscles that move the eyebrow (that dogs have),” Bloom says. “We are exploring using the canine photos we have now to do a version of mood-contagion research, examining the possibility of humans ‘catching’ moods from dogs, as they ‘catch’ moods from humans”