SCIENCE: Dogs' Faces Matter

[dewline]

Discovered accidentally in the course of other duties today: the facial expressions of dogs is a topic of serious research.

Given the existence of veterinary medicine, law enforcement and military usages of dogs, and so on, as well as more familial memories, I am not inclined to laugh at this. At all.

I do expect similar research being conducted regarding cats as well.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191111105001.htm

Comments

[kaffy_r]

I've heard that cat expressions are more subtle and involve checking their entire body, supposedly because they lack the muscles to move areas above their eyes, which dogs have and which approximate eyebrows in humans.

[dewline]

I'm wondering about that facial muscle argument.

https://phys.org/news/2019-11-cat-pain-facial-clue.html

[kaffy_r]

OK, that's cool. Just read it to my BB. We've often been frustrated by our inability to figure out if our cats are in pain. This was really interesting.

[conuly]

Dogs have those muscles, but wolves don't, which is an amazing piece of evolution right there.

[kaffy_r]

That is fascinating, suggesting to me as it does that somehow close association with humans may have played some kind of role. Or am I just being speciescentric?

[conuly]

That's what the Official Scientists think too! They think that dogs evolved mobile eyebrows to better emote at their humans. (Also, like the neoteny, it makes them cuter, and humans do love cute things.)

Cats evolved to meow at humans. But inconsistently, which is why no two cats have the same communication strategy.

[kaffy_r]

All of this makes sense.

And of course cats are inconsistent.

Because Cat.

[agoodwinsmith]

I thought of two things when I read that:
(a) I'd like to see pictures of adult humans in the mix, to see whether or not the group was simply poor at recognizing emotion at all (probably not, but we don't really know, right?)
(b) I think static pictures of emotion are tricky. Most emotion we need to understand is animated and changing over time. It's not just that the corners of the mouth are down in sadness, but the whole mouth crumples into that final shape

Sometimes things that are easy to quantify aren't very revealing.

[agoodwinsmith]

Drat. "Humans" was in the mix. Still interested in moving clips of emotion.