If you're convinced that your dog understands what you're feeling, some scientists in Hungary have actually gathered data to support that idea.
A team at Hungary's ELTE University scanned the brains of 11 dogs to find that their responses to "emotionally significant sounds" were similar to responses from people, Voice of America reported.
The scientists trained the dogs to sit still while their brains were examined with a Magnetic Resonance Scanner, or MRI.
"We have known for a long time that dogs and humans share similar social environment, but now our results show that dogs and humans also have similar brain mechanisms to process social information," said research fellow Attila Andics, as reported by Voice of America.
The team members were able to get the dogs to stay still long enough to get images of their brains through "petting and lots of treats." The researchers then played around 200 sounds that included whining, crying, playful barking and laughing to see how the dogs responded.
When the scientists compared the dogs' brains to responses from human subjects, they found "striking similarities" that could fuel further research.
"It establishes a foundation of a new branch of comparative neuroscience, because until now it was not possible to measure the brain activities of a non-primate and the primate brain in a single experiment," said Andics.
A team at Duke University in North Carolina is also studying the canine brain.
"We've known for a long time that dogs have a lot of behavioral similarities compared to humans," noted Evan MacLean, co-director of the school's Canine Cognition Center.
"But we don't know anything or very little at least about whether some of these behaviors are represented similarly inside the brain of the dog, so this research is providing a first glimpses to whether these behavioral similarities are underlined by similar neural processes."
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