Dogs can read human emotions: Canines recognise when people are feeling happy or sad, even if they've never met them Dogs-read-human-EMOTIONS-Canines-recognise-people-feeling-happy-sad-ve-never-met-them.

Dogs really are man's best friend. 

Scientists have shown for the first time that the animals are masters at recognising emotions, and their mood-reading ability does not just apply to other canines – it also extends to humans.

The insight, from scientists at Lincoln University, makes dogs the only creatures to equal the ability of people to 'tune into' another species.

DOGS CAN 'CATCH' EMOTIONS 

Scientists believe they have unravelled just how dogs seem able to show empathy.

It is because they are able to rapidly mimic or 'catch' emotions, research suggests.

In humans, it has been shown that when experiencing empathy, humans tend to mirror or mimic the emotional expression of the person they are engaging with.

Now researchers led by Elisabetta Palagi, of the University of Pisa have found that dogs possess a key 'building-block of empathy' - being able to mimic emotional behaviour in other dogs.

In research carried out in a park in Palermo, Italy the researchers recorded 49 dogs engaged in play.

The owners of the dogs were interviewed as to how well the dogs knew the dogs they were playing with – whether friends, acquaintance, or strangers, and the dogs were observed as they socialised.

In tests of two key playful behaviours, dogs were found to rapidly copy each other.

The two behaviours studied were a 'play bow' – bowing down, with front legs outstretched and 'relaxed open mouth' – which Dr Palagi said means 'I'm in a positive mood, I'd like to continue playing'.

The mimicry – which would happen within a second of the other dog displaying it - happened more often when the dogs were well known to each other.

The authors write Royal Society journal Open Science: 'Our findings reveal that rapid mimicry occurs not only in humans and other primate species but also in dogs under the playful context.'

He found that when the barking sounded happy and excited, the dogs spent longer looking at the happy faces.

But when they heard growls, they focused on the angry faces.

However, if the barking was neither light-hearted nor threatening, they spent the same amount of time looking at each picture.

This, said Professor Mills, shows that they were combining what they could see and hear to evaluate the mood of the dog in the picture.

Shown pictures of people, accompanied by tapes of speech, produced a similar result, although the pets were less interested in the human faces.

Dogs have been shown to be able to tell happy faces from sad ones before.

But it was not clear if they had simply been trained to tell the two apart without understanding what they were seeing.

The pets used in this study had not seen the dogs or people in the pictures before and did not receive any training on the task.

Professor Mills said: 'It has been a long-standing debate whether dogs can recognise human emotions.

'Many dog owners report anecdotally that their pets seem highly sensitive to the moods of human family members.

'However, there is an important difference between learning to respond appropriately to an angry voice, and recognising a range of very different cues that go together to indicate emotional arousal in another.

'Our findings are the first to show that dogs truly recognise emotions in humans and other dogs.'

Colleague Dr Kun Guo, a psychologist, said: 'Previous studies have indicated that dogs can differentiate between human emotions from cues such as facial expressions, but this is not the same as emotional recognition.

'Our study shows that dogs have the ability to integrate two different sources of sensory information into a coherent perception of emotion in both humans and dogs.