Dog and Human Brains Represent Human Emotional Bodies with Asymmetric Encoding of Happiness and Anger

Abstract

Dogs live in an environment rich in human emotional signals, yet most of what we know about their visual emotion perception comes from faces. Our study shifts this focus to the body, a central channel of emotional communication in dogs and a source of social information when they observe human emotional expressions. Here, we investigated how the brains of dogs and humans represent emotions conveyed by human bodies. Using fMRI, we examined 24 awake companion dogs and 40 humans viewing videos of bodily happiness, anger, and neutral actions, alongside phase-scrambled controls. Both dogs and humans showed occipito-temporal sensitivity to human bodies, with emotional modulation in the right caudal suprasylvian gyrus in dogs and the right extrastriate body area in humans. Multivariate response patterns also differentiated bodily happiness from anger in both dogs and humans. Emotion-specific RSA further showed a similar representational asymmetry: happiness showed consistent category-specific neural patterns, whereas anger showed no comparable category effect but could still be differentiated from happiness and neutral actions. Despite this shared representational asymmetry, the anatomical distribution differed, with happiness represented across more distributed regions in dogs, whereas anger differentiation involved a broader cortical network in humans. No corresponding effects were found for phase-scrambled controls. Together, these findings provide the first direct neural evidence of how the dog brain represents affective information conveyed by human bodies, while leaving open whether emotions expressed by conspecific bodies evoke similar neural representations. More broadly, our results suggest similar representational relationships between bodily emotions in dogs and humans, despite differences in the anatomical distribution of these effects, while highlighting the role of human bodily expressions in dogs' social cognition, and advancing our understanding of the neural basis of emotional communication across species.