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Welcome back to the VCMS blog where we share the latest updates, industry news and insights. Did you know that in terms of pets owned, dogs are the most common pet in UK households, with the share of households reporting dog ownership at 33%? With this in mind, we look at a recent new study that reveals that the puppy dog eyes we all know may not be what it seems.
We all know that expression. Large eyes, looking up at us from below, the whites of their eyes and large pupils that so desperately want us to say yes to something. As dog owners, we can all count that times that we’ve been manipulated by puppy-dog eyes.Well, we think we may have been. A new study has come to light that suggests that puppy-dog eyes are, indeed, not all they are made out to be.
Lasana Harris, a professor of social neuroscience at UCL, found that people are good at spotting anger etched on a dog’s face, but terrible at seeing sadness, and added that “puppy-dog eyes” are a myth.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Professor Harris said, “‘Puppy-dog eyes’ are not an expression seen in dogs or puppies, but a cultural concept to signify a more shallow sadness or regret, or as a deceptive tool to convince someone to facilitate a request,”
“Humans are the only species with a visible sclera, the whites of the eyes. Dogs don’t have them, so the archetypical image you may find on a search engine usually has been edited to show sclera.”
The neuroscientist led two studies that involved 179 people to see if humans were better at understanding the facial expressions of dogs or chimps and bonobos. The findings showed that people were much better at identifying how dogs were feeling than the apes, likely as a result of millennia spent living and working together.
Five emotions were examined — happiness, fear, anger, sadness, and neutral — and the researchers found that people were best at inferring “anger”; followed by “happy” and “neutral”, which did not differ; with “sadness” and “fear” equally poorly detected.
“One of the interesting findings is that people were better at spotting anger across species,” Prof Harris explained.
“An angry face looking directly at you is threatening, so people seem to have the ability to pick out this emotion best regardless of the species they are looking at as it ensures our survival.”
But while angry primates and dogs were easy to spot due to the threat of harm to the person, survival was not dependent on detecting sadness and fear, which Prof Harris says is likely why humans struggle to identify those emotions in both dogs and apes.
“A popular theory surrounding the domestication of dogs is that a lack of aggression allowed wolf-pups to enter campsites and remain with hunter-gatherer humans,” he said.
“Therefore, we pay attention to safety signals from dogs, and joy/pleasure expressions are certainly that.
The study found that people can tell how dogs are feeling better than they can with apes, despite the faces of a chimp and a person being far more similar than those of a dog and its owner.
“We have relationships with dogs, and none with chimps,” Prof Harris reasoned. “Moreover, we have the strongest relationship with dogs of any non-human species since dogs were the first domesticated animal and remained the only one for quite some time.
“We have not tested every species, but I would be surprised if we could better read another species’ face as well as we can read dogs. The many thousands of years we have spent in the presence of dogs gives us vastly more experience with them.”
