When it comes to animals and emotion, the latest research suggests that you can’t tell when your cat is mad, but your dog can tell when you’re sad.
Canines have struck another decisive win in the age-old cats-versus-dogs debate, with new research finding that fido can figure out your expression.
Across two separate experiments, the boffins at the University of Vienna popped 20 healthy family dogs – the majority were border collies – into an MRI machine and showed them images of strangers displaying various emotions.
The first experiment compared reactions when shown a happy stranger against reactions when shown a neutral stranger.
In the second, larger experiment, dogs were shown pairs of pictures with different combinations of happy, sad, fearful, or angry strangers.
While the faithful lassies were seemingly unable to distinguish between most negative facial expressions, a part of the right hemisphere temporal cortex known as the rostral Sylvian gyrus was set a-wagging for happy human faces.
Happy expressions also activated another cluster, the caudate nucleus, which is normally activated by food rewards and familiar scents.
However, the researchers stopped short of implying that dogs feel in the same way that humans feel.
“Our findings indicate that the dog brain can distinguish between positive and negative human facial expressions, and between some negative facial expressions,” they wrote in iScience.
“Our findings do not assert human-like semantic encoding of emotions in dogs.
“Rather, under stringent controls for low-level visual properties and HMAX-captured early-to-mid-level features, we show that dog brains exhibit different neural responses to different human facial expressions, such that patterns of activity (1) separate facial expressions by valence and (2) distinguish among some negative facial expressions.
“Importantly, our data do not identify which specific facial features drive these distinctions. The expression labels (i.e., happiness, anger, sadness, and fear) used here were defined in human-validated stimulus databases, and thus should be interpreted as descriptors of the stimuli rather than descriptors of dogs’ subjective experience.
“Claims are therefore restricted to brain representational separability, not to human-analog semantic categories.”
Cats, meanwhile, are a whole different bucket of fish when it comes to emotions.
A separate study, this one led by Adelaide University, analysed comments on 11 online videos depicting cats in distress and found that humans are actually quite bad at interpreting what Felix is feeling.
All videos were uploaded to the internet with a claim that the kitties were “playing”, even though the cat was displaying what the researchers considered “unambiguous” signs of dissent.
These included vocalisations like hissing, spitting and growling and physical behaviours like baring teeth, blocking touch, biting, hiding, and scratching.
The analysis found that somewhere between 75% and 93% of comments on all videos were positive toward the interactions, with most falling into key themes that the researchers said “highlight patterns of misinterpretation and rationalisation” in human-cat relationships.
According to the boffins, when a cat’s early dissent signals go ignored, the feline can experience acute stress. Over time, this can lead to consequences for their health and wellbeing.
“Beyond simple misinterpretation of cat body language, viewer comments reflected entrenched beliefs about cat preferences and human-cat dynamics, were indicative of cognitive dissonance and, in some cases, echoed harmful narratives akin to human discourse around women and victims of intimate harm,” the Adelaide University boffins wrote in Anthrozoos.
They called for more innovative approaches to public education about “respecting cat dissent”.
Send videos of your cat to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au and I will judge whether that kitten is judging you.
