What causes a dog to slink away from a cranky person, when they will quietly approach and lean against someone who is weeping? We’ve all seen it – they can respond to our feelings. And science agrees dogs have emotions too.

These social skills could underpin dogs’ success in living with us. But do you think your dog could tell an angry person’s face from a sad or fearful one?

New research published in the journal iScience explored that question, and revealed interesting findings from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of dogs’ brains.

Scanning dogs’ brains

Dogs are sensitive to human faces. They look longer in response to our emotional expressions and sounds compared with neutral ones.

Scientists weren’t sure whether dogs were just differentiating “good mood” (happy) from “bad mood” (angry, fearful or sad), or treating these expressions as genuine indicators of different emotions.

The new study, by Raúl Hernández-Pérez, a neuroscientist at the University of Vienna,........

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