Brain scans show that dogs respond to voices and emotions similar to how humans do

If you own a dog, most likely you're well aware that your canine companion not only picks up on your words, but also the feelings behind your words. A new study shows that this ability comes from dogs having similar regions of the brain that humans have for processing voices and emotions, and it hints that many more animal species may share this ability as well.

The study was conducted by a team of ethologists (animal behaviour researchers) from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. Using lots of treats and praise, they trained a group of 11 dogs — a mix of golden retrievers and border collies — to lie still on the bed of a functional MRI scanner. While inside the scanner, they were exposed to sounds like dogs barking and whining, and humans laughing and crying, and the research team observed what parts of their brain were activated by the sounds. They performed the same test, with the same sounds, on 22 different people, and then compared how human and dog brains react to those sounds.

[ Related: Bright light may breed stronger emotions ]

While the human participants showed more response to the human sounds and the canine participants showed more response to the canine sounds (pretty much as expected), results from both showed very similar responses to the emotions (positive or negative) implied by the sounds.

"Dogs and humans use similar brain mechanisms to process social information," said Atilla Andics, of the MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group that conducted the study, according to the video abstract they filmed. "This is a first step to understanding what makes vocal communication between dogs and humans so successful."

The video abstract, which discusses not only the research, but shows how it was done and how the dogs were trained, can be watched below:

Even though the dogs seemed perfectly happy to participate and only appeared a little bored during the procedure, in case anyone is worried about them possibly being forced to do this, Andics said that only dogs who actually wanted to participate were kept in the study.

"Dogs that didn't like the procedure stopped coming," he told Wired.

[ More Geekquinox: Southern Ontario, Quebec get ready for big freeze as the polar vortex returns ]

Previous studies have compared how the brains of humans and other primates process vocal cues and emotions, but this is the first one to directly compare the brains of humans and a non-primate mammal.

The researchers mention that the common regions of the brain for social communication may result from a common ancestor between dogs and humans on the evolutionary tree, some 100 million years ago. However, it may also represent an example of convergent evolution, where species independently evolve similar traits, usually because they're the most useful for survival, but in this case, possibly as the two species evolved together over the years we've coexisted.

Geek out with the latest in science and weather.
Follow @ygeekquinox on Twitter!