Can Dogs Read Your Facial Expressions?

Your dog can determine if you're happy just by looking at your face.

Your dog can determine if you’re happy just by looking at your face.

That’s according to a new study about how dogs respond to human expressions. researchers used MRI to scan the dogs’ brains while they looked at pictures of people’s faces. When the dogs saw happy faces, it activated a part of their brains associated with reward processing. The same region lights up when a dog smells a familiar person or anticipates a treat…but, neutral faces did not. The researchers also detected differences in the brain activity associated with faces showing fear versus anger or sadness.