"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 vocalisation from the same individual with either a positive or negative valence or Brownian noise.".
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.".
A researcher penned: "Overall, the results of this study suggest that naturalistic DDS, comprising of both dog-directed [speech patterns] and dog-relevant content words, improves dogs' attention and may strengthen the affiliative bond between humans and their pets.
"This usually takes place within species; however, in the case of domestic dogs, it might be advantageous to recognise the emotions of humans as well as other dogs.
"Dogs looked significantly longer at the face whose expression was congruent to the valence of vocalisation, for both conspecifics and heterospecifics, an ability previously known only in humans.
