Your furry friend has the ability to recognise how you are feeling just by facial expressions and sounds a new study has found.
Dr Kun Guo, a scientist from the University of Lincoln in the UK, studied dogs' abilities to integrate visual and auditory cues to recognise emotions in other dogs and humans.
The study uses a cross-modal preferential looking paradigm or, in unscientific speak, two screens that play different footage simultaneously, with either human or dog faces.
These faces showed different emotional valences (a term used to characterise emotions) on each screen for example happy versus sad, with a single vocalisation from the same individual that was either a positive or negative noise.
The results showed the dogs looked "significantly" longer at the face whose expression matched the sound for both its own species and humans.
This ability is previously known only in humans.
The study says it means dogs can "extract and integrate bimodal sensory emotional information", meaning they can distinguish between positive and negative emotions from their own pals and owners.
Something to think about when you're next playing fetch.
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