Do Dogs Use Facial Expressions to Communicate with Us?

It seems that dogs make more expressive faces when humans are watching. Are they trying to communicate? Learn more in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here. If you're like me, you love dogs,
possibly more than people. Some days, their warm eyes and
doggie grins have me wrapped around their fluffy pupper tails,
and according to new research from the University of Portsmouth's
Dog Cognition Center, dogs deliberately make more facial expressions when

(00:25):
we're watching them, and it could be their way to
communicate with us. The study was led by Dr Julienne
Kaminsky and published in a twenty seventeen issue of Scientific Reports.
Kaminski and her research team came to their conclusion after
watching twenty four different dogs, all family pets of varying
breeds and ages. Each dog was filmed individually in a

(00:45):
room with a person who went through various scenarios, including
looking at the dog, looking away from the dog, and
giving the dog food. The scientists then studied the dog's
facial expressions using the Dog Facial Action Coding System or
Dog FACTS, which is a scientific tool for coding canines
facial movements. It was adapted from the FACTS system created

(01:06):
for humans back in night. Kaminsky and her team discovered
that each dog made animated faces when the person in
the room was looking at it, including raising its eyebrows
and sticking out its tongue a much more than when
the person's back was turned. In a press statement, Dr
Kaminsky said the findings appear to support evidence that dogs
are sensitive to humans attention and that expressions are potentially

(01:28):
active attempts to communicate, not simple emotional displays. Most surprisingly
is that even the presence of food didn't influence the
dogs as much as human affection. Kaminski said, we knew
domestic dogs paid attention to how attentive a human is.
In a previous study, we found, for example, the dogs
stole food more often when the human's eyes were closed

(01:49):
or when they had their back turned. In another study,
we found dogs follow the gaze of a human if
the human first establishes eye contact with the dog, so
the dog knows that the gaze shift is erected at them.
Kabinski says it's possible that the expressions of dogs have
changed as they've become more domesticated, but the study does
have its limits. Twenty four canines makes for a small

(02:11):
study sample, so it's likely that more dogs should be
studied to confirm these findings, which sounds like an excellent
research session to me. Today's episode was written by Sarah
Glime and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this
and lots of other tail wagging topics, visit our home planet,

(02:31):
how Stuff Works dot com