Previous research we’ve highlighted on our blog suggested that humans are quite good at reading their pet dog’s facial expressions. But what about the other way around? How good are dogs at reading their owners’ emotions?

Up until now, scientific evidence and research in this realm was lacking, but a new study finds that dogs are able to tell the difference between happy and angry human facial expressions.

Biologist Corsin Muller of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Austria and his colleagues tested 11 dogs using a touchscreen. They trained the dogs to touch either a happy or angry face for a treat. They presented the dogs with their the top half or the bottom half of the faces to ensure the animals weren’t just responding to a smile or baring of the teeth.

The pets trained to pick out happy expressions could do so when presented with different halves of a face, as well as when presented with faces the animals hadn’t seen before.

The dogs trained to respond to angry faces were also able to pick out angry expressions among the choices they were asked to make. However, it took them longer to learn their task than the dogs trained on happy faces.

Researchers don’t yet know whether the dogs’ ability to discriminate between the two expressions is because of past experiences or the result of the domestication process. While primates are known to recognize faces, dogs may have been especially adapted for emotional sensitivity to humans during their domestication. The researchers plan to investigate how common this ability is by testing pigs and other animals.

Taken from Medical News Today

In the US and many Western countries, people are urged to manage “negative” feelings of anger or suffer its ill effects. But new research published in Psychological Science suggests that anger may actually be linked with better, not worse, health in certain cultures. The findings are based off research conducted with participants from the US and Japan.

“Many of us in Western societies naively believe that anger is bad for health, and beliefs like these appear to be bolstered by recent scientific findings,” says psychological scientist Shinobu Kitayama of the University of Michigan. “But our study suggests that the truism linking anger to ill health may be valid only within the cultural boundary of the ‘West,’ where anger functions as an index of frustration, poverty, low status and everything else that potentially compromises health.”

“These findings show how socio-cultural factors go under the skin to influence vital biological processes,” explains Kitayama.

In other words, it’s the circumstances that elicit anger, and not anger itself, that seem to be bad for health. In previous work, Kitayama and colleagues found that anger can function as a signal of high status and privilege in Asia — drawing on this, they hypothesized that greater expression of anger might be associated with better health among Asian participants.

To explore the link, the researchers examined data from American participants drawn from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) survey and data from Japanese participants drawn from the Midlife in Japan (MIDJA) survey.

To measure health, the researchers looked at biomarkers for inflammation and cardiovascular functioning, both of which have been linked to anger expression in previous research. The combination of these two factors served as a measure of overall biological health risk.

The researchers also looked at measures that gauged various aspects of anger, including how often participants expressed angry feelings through verbally or physically aggressive behaviors (e.g., “I slam doors,” “I say nasty things”).

The data revealed that greater anger expression was associated with increased biological health risk among American participants, as previous studies have shown.

But greater anger expression was associated with reduced biological health risk among Japanese participants. And the association was not explained by other potentially related factors — such as age, gender, chronic health conditions, smoking and alcohol consumption, social status, and experience of negative emotions more generally.

“The association between greater anger and compromised biological health, taken for granted in the current (Western) literature, was completely reversed so that greater anger was associated with better biological health among Japanese,” explains Kitayama.

The researchers did not find a link between other facets of anger, such as chronic propensity toward anger or the extent to which participants suppressed feelings of anger, and health outcomes.

Together, these findings suggest that the link between anger expression and health reflects different experiences across cultural contexts. In the US, expressing anger seems to reflect the degree to which people experience negative events, while in Japan it may reflect the degree to which people feel empowered and entitled.

“Our point is that anger expression is a complex phenomenon likely motivated by a variety of factors, many of which could be culture-specific. These cultural factors must be taken into account to achieve a full understanding of the link between anger and health,” the researchers write.

Kitayama and colleagues hope that future longitudinal research that follows participants over time will help to shed light on the relationship:

“Such research will help us address whether improving personal and social life styles so as to reduce anger may entail long-term health benefits.”