We should smile at our dogs - a new scientific study reveals why
"So this finding suggests that happy faces, even those of strangers have a positive value for dogs."Cuaya and her co-researcher, Raúl Hernández-Pérez, went on to investigate how dogs responded to other human emotions - showing dogs images of people displaying happiness, anger, fear, and sadness. "So we should smile at the dogs - even at random dogs in the street."The findings are published in the journal iScience, external.Related topicsNeuroscienceDogsEvolutionScience & Environment
- ▪"So this finding suggests that happy faces, even those of strangers have a positive value for dogs."Cuaya and her co-researcher, Raúl Hernández-Pérez, went on to investigate how dogs responded to other human emotions - showing dogs images o
- ▪"So we should smile at the dogs - even at random dogs in the street."The findings are published in the journal iScience, external.Related topicsNeuroscienceDogsEvolutionScience & Environment
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| Original publisher | BBC News — Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8kr3yrl6eo?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss |
| Publication time | Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:02:57 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-10T14:30:43.060Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-10T14:30:43.060Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | hJUGjd1oP7d2 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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We should smile at our dogs - a new scientific study reveals whyImage source, Laura CuayaImage caption, Kun-kun, a very good dog, sits patiently in the brain scanner ByVictoria GillScience correspondentPublished27 minutes agoAny dog lover will tell you their canine friend picks up on their mood and emotions.Now scientists have worked out exactly what is going on inside a dog's brain when it sees a human - even a complete stranger - smiling or scowling.Their research involved 14 dogs in total who all sat very still in a brain scanner while they were shown pictures of people's faces.Photographs of happy, smiling human faces made an area of the brain that is associated with reward "light up" with activity.This reward circuitry is the part of the brain that is activated when we enjoy and…
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