Your Dog Really Can Detect Your Emotions

A new study has confirmed what dog owners have suspected forever: your dog knows exactly how you're feeling.

As a dog owner, I like to think that Charles can sense when I'm sad or angry or excited. Unfortunately, we can't just ASK dogs, "hey, can you guess what emotion I'm feeling right now?" so we have to rely on their responses to tell us the answer. A study that was published in the journal "Biology Letters" says that dogs can recognize emotions in not only humans, but other dogs, as well, by using audio and visual cues.

How the study worked, is dogs were shown various images of humans/dogs and paired the image with an emotional sound. Some of the emotions in the photos matched the sound that accompanied it, and others did not. The people conducting the study used the amount of time the dog spent gazing at the photos to determine if they understood the emotion or not. Turns out, the dogs gazed longer at the images where the emotion in the photo matched the emotion in the sound, concluding that these dogs (none of which had any prior training) were able to put the two things together to instinctively understand an emotion.

So, there you have it! Your dog really DOES know how you're feeling. They really are man's best friend!

[Via Mashable]