Why you should smile at your dog: new research reveals how dogs respond to happy human faces
Dogs study us closely. They notice the hand reaching for a lead, the change in our voice and, it seems, the expression on our face.
The study, Dog brain representations of human facial expressions: Encoding happiness and differentiating specific negative expressions, was written by Raúl Hernández-Pérez, Luis Concha, Attila Andics, Rodolfo Bernal-Gamboa and Laura V. Cuaya. Working with awake dogs in MRI scanners, the team found that happy human faces produced a distinct response in areas connected with social and reward processing. The full findings can be read here.
A little more than a nice gesture
The interesting detail is that the people in the photographs were strangers. The dogs were not simply responding to someone they knew arriving home. A cheerful human face appeared to have a positive quality of its own.
What to take from it
This was a small experiment, not a rule for every dog. A smile will not make an anxious dog comfortable, and it should never replace calm movement, space and attention to body language.
Still, it adds something lovely to what dog people already suspect: affection is communicated in small ways. Praise sounds better when we mean it. A welcome feels warmer when our face agrees. And the smile we give our dog may be part of the reward, too.
So smile at your dog. Not because science has turned it into another instruction, but because they may understand more of the gesture than we realised.
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