Dogs and humans respond to emotionally competent stimuli by producing different facial actions

The commonality of facial expressions of emotion has been studied in different species since Darwin, with most of the research focusing on closely related primate species. However, it is unclear to what extent there exists common facial expression in species more phylogenetically distant, but sharing a need for common interspecific emotional understanding. Here we used the objective, anatomically-based tools, FACS and DogFACS (Facial Action Coding Systems), to quantify and compare human and domestic dog facial expressions in response to emotionally-competent stimuli associated with different categories of emotional arousal. We sought to answer two questions: Firstly, do dogs display specific discriminatory facial movements in response to different categories of emotional stimuli? Secondly, do dogs display similar facial movements to humans when reacting in emotionally comparable contexts? We found that dogs displayed distinctive facial actions depending on the category of stimuli. However, dogs produced different facial movements to humans in comparable states of emotional arousal. These results refute the commonality of emotional expression across mammals, since dogs do not display human-like facial expressions. Given the unique interspecific relationship between dogs and humans, two highly social but evolutionarily distant species sharing a common environment, these findings give new insight into the origin of emotion expression

Facial expression megamix: tests of dimensional and category accounts of emotional recognition

We report four experiments investigating the perception of photographic quality continua of interpolated ('morphed') facial expressions derived from prototypes of the 6 emotions in the Ekman and Friesen (1976) series (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust and anger). In Experiment 1, morphed images made from all possible pairwise combinations of expressions were presented in random order; subjects identified these as belonging to distinct expression categories corresponding to the prototypes at each end of the relevant continuum, This result was replicated in Experiment 2, which also included morphs made from a prototype with a neutral expression, and allowed 'neutral' as a response category. These findings are inconsistent with the view that facial expressions are recognised by locating them along two underlying dimensions, since such a View predicts that at least some transitions between categories should involve neutral regions or,identification as a different emotion. Instead, they suggest that facial expressions of basic emotions are recognised by their fit to discrete categories. Experiment 3 used continua involving 6 emotions to demonstrate best discrimination of pairs of stimuli falling across category boundaries; this provides further evidence of categorical perception of facial expressions of emotion. However, in both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, reaction time data showed that increasing distance from the prototype had a definite cost on ability to identify emotion in the resulting morphed face. Moreover, Experiment 4 showed that subjects had some insight into which emotions were blended to create specific morphed images. Hence, categorical perception effects were found even though subjects were sensitive to physical properties of these morphed facial expressions. We suggest that rapid classification of prototypes and better across boundary discriminability reflect the underlying organisation of human categorisation abilities.</p

Lies and Decision Making

Lies and Decision Makin