Your Dog Really Can Tell When You're Happy

If you’ve ever suspected your dog can read your mind—sussing out through some canine intuition when you’re happy, sad, scared, or cross—you’re half right. Many dogs can do exactly that, but it’s not mind-reading that’s involved: it’s face-reading. That’s the word from a new study in the journal iScience, in which researchers not only established dogs’ ability to discern human moods by examining our facial expressions, but also pinpointed the spots in the brain where that processing takes place. They did this by scanning canine brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).Figuring out how dogs read human emotions“This ability to perceive emotions in humans is really hard to find in other species,” says Rául Hernández Pérez, professor of psychology at the University of Vienna and first author of the study. “Chimpanzees have a harder time than dogs. Wolves can also do it, but not at the same level as dogs can.”Getting a dog to tolerate an MRI scanner is no small matter. The same things that so often freak people out about the MRI experience—the confined space and the infernal noise—can have a similar effect on a dog. That was an impediment to the kind of study the research...