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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 15, 2015

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REAL LIFE NEWS: DOGS KNOW IF YOU’RE HAPPY OR SAD

by Hazed

If you own a dog you are probably aware that they can pick up on their owners’ moods, but now research confirms that dogs can tell the difference between happy faces and angry ones.

Scientists from the Clever Dog Lab at Messerlie Research Institute, Vienna, trained dogs to associate faces showing either happy or angry expressions with a reward. Then they showed the dogs faces of humans they hadn’t seen before, and the dogs were able to tell the difference between the happy and angry ones and knew which ones to go to for food.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean the dogs understand what the facial expressions mean! But in the experiments, the dogs being trained to associate happy faces with the reward picked it up a lot faster than the dogs being trained with the angry ones. “It seems as if they don’t like to touch an angry face,” a scientist commenting on the research said. “So here we have some suggestive evidence that they interpret those pictures, and maybe they really understand an angry face to be something they don’t like.”

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31384525

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