Human Empathy, Personality and Experience Affect the Emotion Ratings of Dog and Human Facial Expressions

Abstract

Facial expressions are important for humans in communicating emotions to the conspecifics and enhancing interpersonal understanding. Many muscles producing facial expressions in humans are also found in domestic dogs, but little is known about how humans perceive dog facial expressions, and which psychological factors influence people’s perceptions. Here, we asked 34 observers to rate the valence, arousal, and the six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear, and anger/aggressiveness) from images of human and dog faces with Pleasant, Neutral and Threatening expressions. We investigated how the subjects’ personality (the Big Five Inventory), empathy (Interpersonal Reactivity Index) and experience of dog behavior affect the ratings of dog and human faces. Ratings of both species followed similar general patterns: human subjects classified dog facial expressions from pleasant to threatening very similarly to human facial expressions. Subjects with higher emotional empathy evaluated Threatening faces of both species as more negative in valence and higher in anger/aggressiveness. More empathetic subjects also rated the happiness of Pleasant humans but not dogs higher, and they were quicker in their valence judgments of Pleasant human, Threatening human and Threatening dog faces. Experience with dogs correlated positively with ratings of Pleasant and Neutral dog faces. Personality also had a minor effect on the ratings of Pleasant and Neutral faces in both species. The results imply that humans perceive human and dog facial expression in a similar manner, and the perception of both species is influenced by psychological factors of the evaluators. Especially empathy affects both the speed and intensity of rating dogs’ emotional facial expressions.

How Japanese companion dog and cat owners’ degree of attachment relates to the attribution of emotions to their animals

“…Our analyses demonstrate that all respondents were highly attached to their companion animals, and the attachment levels positively correlated with the willingness to attribute emotions to companion animals. This finding implies that a combination of animal experience (pet ownership) and strong attachment may promote owners’ brain activations to attributing emotions to animals [ 5 ]. The identification of this correlation could serve as an alternative to or complementary part of existing methods to assess animal emotions, as well as animal welfare.…”

“…An important ethical issue in animal welfare appears precisely due to the opinions held by many people that most animals have emotional experiences. If animals experience disappointment and fear due to an inability to perform their natural behavior patterns or, more directly, due to animal cruelty, then this has moral importance and, in turn, may have a major influence on animal welfare [ 4 , 5 ]. Therefore, a better understanding of animal emotions is an important step toward promoting optimum animal welfare.…”

“…The concise design, simple language, specific purpose and explicit meaning of each statement of the PBS allow it to be more easily understood by respondents and enable us to arrive at a single aggregated outcome [ 18 , 19 ]. Additionally, compared to the lay public, companion animal owners would be a better choice when approaching animal emotions because their direct experience in interacting with animals may allow them to better comprehend animals’ behavior associated with emotions [ 5 , 20 ].…”

Sleep macrostructure is modulated by positive and negative social experience in adult pet dogs

“…Furthermore, it has been shown that human emotions are contagious to dogs [19,20]. Humans in turn are able to attribute emotions to dogs' facial expressions [21] and vocalizations [22].…”

Time-resolved classification of dog brain signals reveals early processing of faces, species and emotion

“…As amygdala processes both negative and positive emotions 44 , we cannot rule out the effect of arousal in the current emotion-sensitive responses instead of the stimulus valence. Previously, when the current stimuli were www.nature.com/scientificreports/ rated by human subjects, threatening/aggressive dogs received the highest scores for both arousal and negative valence, followed by threatening/angry humans 45 . The early brain responses of dogs in this study follow the same pattern.…”