Abstract
The
perception of emotional expressions allows animals to evaluate the
social intentions and motivations of each other. This usually takes
place within species; however, in the case of domestic dogs, it might be
advantageous to recognize the emotions of humans as well as other dogs.
In this sense, the combination of visual and auditory cues to
categorize others' emotions facilitates the information processing and
indicates high-level cognitive representations. Using a cross-modal
preferential looking paradigm, we presented dogs with either human or
dog faces with different emotional valences (happy/playful versus
angry/aggressive) paired with a single vocalization from the same
individual with either a positive or negative valence or Brownian noise.
Dogs looked significantly longer at the face whose expression was
congruent to the valence of vocalization, for both conspecifics and
heterospecifics, an ability previously known only in humans. These
results demonstrate that dogs can extract and integrate bimodal sensory
emotional information, and discriminate between positive and negative
emotions from both humans and dogs.
