This is manipulation I can get behind.
A new study reveals that the infamous puppy dog eyes expression isn’t a way that our beloved pets express sadness — in fact, it may be a clever ploy by the dogs to receive attention and affection.
Researchers from the University of Portsmouth’s Dog Cognition Center report that dogs mostly use facial expressions in the presence of a human, while very rarely adopting them when on their own. The findings question the assumption that our canine pets‘ facial expressions are involuntary and tied to their emotional state. Rather, they might just be a medium to communicate and are usually a direct response to attention or a request for one.
Anyone who’s ever befriended a dog knows what the puppy dog eyes are all about. It’s quite simple to pull off — all the dogs have to do is to raise their brow, making the eyes appear wider and (to a human) sadder. But boy is it effective at getting them some attention from any human struck by the visage.
Which, according to a team led by Dr. Juliane Kaminski, is exactly the point. Following their study, aiming to understand if dog’s facial expressions are “subject to audience effects and/ or changes in response to an arousing stimulus (e.g food)”, the team reports that dogs don’t involuntarily strike facial expressions when aroused — rather, they do it to impress us.
The findings suggest that dogs are sensitive to a human’s attention and, most excitingly, that their facial expressions are active attempts at communication, not involuntary emotional displays.
For the study, the team worked with 24 dogs, all family pets but of various breeds, aged 1 to 12 years. Each dog was tied by their leashes about one meter away from a human participant. The dogs’ faces were filmed through all test scenarios, from the person facing the dog attentively to being distracted, with his or her body turned away from the animal. The team looked at three measurements to establish why dogs strike up facial expressions: attentive vs. not attentive, food present vs. food absent, and a trial run.
For this latter measurement, the experimenter “stood still and did not respond to any of the dog’s behaviors,” and was asked to look “at a predetermined spot at the opposite wall and […] not actively seek eye contact with the dog when she was oriented towards the dog.” The trial would last 2 minutes, after which the experimenter briefly interacted with the dog and then “changed her position according to the condition presented in the next trial.”
Waller does not believe dogs originally produced the expression to win humans over. More likely, she said, is that animals that happened to deploy puppy dog eyes tapped into a response humans had evolved over millennia of living in large groups, where reading facial expressions was crucial.
Dissections of six dogs – a chihuahua, a labrador, a bloodhound, a German shepherd, a Siberian husky and a mongrel – found all had the LAOM muscle. But in the four grey wolves studied, the muscle was missing, save for a few scant muscle fibres. Since all dogs are derived from wolves, the comparison suggests the LAOM arose in the domestication process.
After establishing that dogs and wolves have different muscles around the eyes, the researchers filmed the animals to see how their expressions varied. They filmed nine wolves in two different animal parks, and 27 dogs, mostly Staffordshire bull terriers, in shelters across the UK. The footage was reviewed by a trained specialist who was not told about the scientists’ hypothesis. The specialist recorded when the animals made the puppy dog eyes expression, and rated its intensity on a five-point scale.
The sad, imploring expression held such power over humans during 33,000 years of canine domestication that the preference for dogs that could pull off the look steered the evolution of their facial muscles, researchers have said.
To investigate how the look developed in dogs, the UK-US research team acquired wolf and dog cadavers from taxidermists and US state organisations and dissected their heads to compare the facial muscles. No animals were killed for the research.
According to a number of sources, puppy dog eyes are not representative of true guilt, but an act of submission. Dogs do have emotions, and they do demonstrate body language. They also have the capacity to behave based on association. Think of the classic Pavlov’s Dog example, in which a dog was conditioned to associate a ringing bell with meal time, and began to salivate more every time the bell rang.
Hannah Pasternak is a writer based in New York City. She has two dogs and nine pairs of overalls.
“Puppy dog eyes” are aptly named. These are the same eyes that dogs make when they do something wrong, beg for a treat, or want some extra attention. The expression represents a certain range of emotions, including guilt. But does the infamous look imitate a real feeling? In other words, do our dogs really feel guilt? Or do they just make it look that way?
When my dogs have an “accident,” as we like to say, we let them outside so that they can “finish their business” while we clean up the mess left on the living room carpet. When they come back in, their tails are squeezed between their hind legs, their ears are droopy and down, and their eyes seem more human and sad than they usually do.
I recently conducted an experiment to prove this theory. I walked into the kitchen where both of my dogs were lounging, contorted my body to look as tall as 5’5” can get, and put on my angriest face. “HOW COULD YOU DO SUCH A THING?” I asked them in the meanest voice I could muster.
The Science Behind Puppy Dog Eyes
Our canine friends evolved extra muscle fibers around their eyes and mouths that allow them to make facial expressions humans find adorable
When a canine companion wants an extra treat, one glance of those endearing puppy-dog eyes is all it takes. Now, scientists suggest domesticated dogs may have evolved extra facial muscles to win people over with their adorable expressions.
Humans may have contributed to the heart-warming look through thousands of years of selective breeding for the animated faces, a statement explains. Presented at the Experimental Biology 2022 Meeting in Philadelphia, the preliminary research offers a deeper look at how dogs communicate with us.
“Dogs are really unique from any other domesticated animals in that they reciprocate a bond with their humans. They truly are our companions,” says study author Madisen Omstead, a biologist at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, to Chen Ly at New Scientist. “They demonstrate this through their mutual gaze – that puppy-dog eye look that they give us.”
In humans, tiny muscles around our eyes and mouths are responsible for small, quick facial expressions like raising an eyebrow, reports Robyn White for Newsweek. Our so-called mimetic muscles are powered by fast-twitch myosin fibers that tire quickly, which is why we can cant hold them these expressions for very long, a statement explains. Other muscles contain slow-twitch myosin fibers used for long, controlled movements.
For the experiment, the research team quantified how many fast-twitch and slow-twitch fibers wolves and dogs in their mimetic muscles, New Scientist reports. Fast-twitch fibers made up 66 to 95 percent fast-twitch fibers, whereas wolves average 25 percent, reports Tom Metcalfe for NBC News. The wolves facials muscles were dominated by slow-twitch muscles, which they might use for extended movements like howling.
Like humans, dogs have a higher percentage of fast-twitch fibers in their facial muscles, Newsweek reports. As dogs branched off from their wolf ancestors 33,000 years ago, the need for slow-twitch muscles may have decreased, and their facial expressions became more captivating and familiar to people.
The fast-twitching muscles around dogs mouths may have evolved to produce the sharp and snappy barks pets use to communicate with their humans today, reports Anna Salleh for Australias ABC News. Dogs may bark at their humans to be playful, get our attention, protect their territory, or warn us.
“It was part of the domestication process somehow — whether humans chose dogs consciously that were barking, or whether it was a by-product of domestication,” says study author Anne Burrows, a biological anthropologist, to ABC News.
Scientists plan on further looking into how barking developed in dogs and why humans may have selected this trait during the domestication process. The team also plans to investigate if domestication shaped the mimetic muscles of other mammals, Burrows tells Newsweek. Recommended Videos Most Popular