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   Dogs only non-human mammal that recognize facial expressions, study says    
      
      
   By Agata Blaszczak Boxe    
   Published February 13, 2015    
   FoxNews.com    
      
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   If you ever get the impression that your dog can "tell" whether you look   
   content or annoyed, you may be onto something. Dogs may indeed be able to   
   discriminate between happy and angry human faces, according to a new study.    
      
   Researchers trained a group of 11 dogs to distinguish between images of the   
   same person making either a happy or an angry face. During the training stage,   
   each dog was shown only the upper half or the lower half of the person's face.    
      
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   The investigators then tested the pups' ability to discriminate between human   
   facial expressions by showing them different images from the ones used in   
   training. The dogs were shown either the other half of the face used in the   
   training stage, the other    
   halves of people's faces not used in training, a face that was the same half   
   as the training face but from a different person, or the left half of the face   
   used in the training stage.    
      
   The researchers found that the dogs were able to pick the angry or happy face   
   by touching a picture of it with their noses more often than one would expect   
   by random chance.    
      
   The study showed the animals had figured out how to transfer what they learned   
   about human faces during training to new faces in the testing stage, the   
   researchers said. [10 Things You Didn't Know About Dogs]    
      
   "We can rule out that the dogs simply discriminated [between] the pictures   
   based on a simple salient cue, such as the visibility of teeth," said study   
   author Corsin Müller, an animal behavior researcher at Messerli Research   
   Institute at the University of    
   Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.    
      
   "Instead, our results suggest that the successful dogs realized that a smiling   
   mouth means the same thing as smiling eyes," and the same rule applies to an   
   angry mouth having the same meaning as angry eyes, Müller said. (The   
   researchers originally    
   recruited 24 dogs for the study, but 13 of them dropped out for various   
   reasons before the researchers started training them, for instance, because   
   their owners did not have time to bring the animals to the lab.)    
      
   Previous research had demonstrated that dogs are able to distinguish between   
   different expressions in people they are familiar with, even if the animals   
   are shown only part of the face, such as the eye region. Researchers had also   
   previously attempted to    
   see whether dogs could tell the difference between emotional expressions of   
   human faces, but the results were inconclusive.    
      
   "With our study, which was inspired by these previous attempts, we think we   
   can now confidently conclude that at least some dogs can discriminate human   
   facial expressions," Müller told Live Science.    
      
   At this point, it is not clear why dogs seem to be equipped with the ability   
   to recognize different facial expressions in humans, the researchers said. "To   
   us, the most likely explanation appears to be that the basis lies in the   
   life-long co-habitation    
   of the dogs with humans, during which the dogs get a lot of exposure to human   
   facial expressions," and this exposure has provided them with many   
   opportunities to learn to distinguish between them, Müller said.    
      
   The study was published today (Feb. 12) in the journal Current Biology.    
      
   Follow Agata Blaszczak-Boxe on Twitter. Follow Live Science @livescience,   
   Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.    
      
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