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Your Dog May Know You’re Sad Just by Looking at Your Face, Study Finds

Researchers found dogs’ brains responded differently to human expressions of happiness, fear, anger, and sadness.

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There’s a reason dogs are trusted as emotional companions. If it seems like they have a nearly supernatural ability to sense human emotion, it’s because they practically do. As researchers at the University of Vienna recently found, dogs are especially good at parsing the emotions we humans are expressing with our faces.

The study, published in iScience, used fMRI scans to watch what happened inside dogs’ brains while they looked at photographs of human faces showing happiness, sadness, anger and fear. One of the study’s limitations is also one of the reasons the........

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