Understanding how humans perceive and process the emotional expressions of both conspecifics and nonhuman animals has important implications for social neuroscience and interspecies communication. In their 2024 study, Miiamaaria V. Kujala, Lauri Parkkonen, and Jyrki Kujala investigated the millisecond-level temporal dynamics of human brain activity when viewing dog and human facial expressions.
The researchers recorded cortical responses to emotional faces and found generally similar neural activation patterns for both human and dog expressions. These included activity in the occipital cortex within 500 ms, the temporal cortex between 100–500 ms, and the parietal cortex at 150–350 ms. Responses to dog faces were particularly pronounced in temporal regions, aligning with neural markers of early posterior negativity and late posterior positivity. This suggests that dog facial expressions elicit heightened attentional engagement due to their emotional salience.
Using support vector machine classifiers, the study demonstrated that participants with higher trait-level empathy were more accurate in distinguishing between aggressive and happy dog faces, as well as between happy and neutral human faces. These findings suggest that empathy enhances the decoding of emotional cues by boosting attentional mechanisms, particularly when the stimuli are subjectively or ecologically significant.
Overall, this study highlights how empathy bridges human perception across species. By facilitating more precise recognition of emotional expressions in both humans and dogs, empathy may play a vital role in strengthening human-animal relationships and promoting effective interspecies communication.
Source: Kujala, M. V., Parkkonen, L., & Kujala, J. (2024). Empathy enhances decoding accuracy of human neurophysiological responses to emotional facial expressions of humans and dogs. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 19. Authors: Miiamaaria V. Kujala, Lauri Parkkonen, Jyrki Kujala. Journal: Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
