For the Love of a Dog (9 page)

No matter where you fall on the continuum, the good news is that there’s a significant practice effect on the ability to read facial expressions, whether on a dog or a human. I am reminded of this every time I show a particular video sequence of an adolescent dog hovering over a stolen toy. The dog trainers go on alert when the dog’s face becomes still and his eyes go round, because they know what’s coming next. In contrast, the general public watches the video in innocent silence, gasping in shock when the dog lashes out, snarling and lunging toward the owner. The professionals know that freezing in place with rounded eyes is a threatening posture, but because the dog was neither growling nor showing his teeth, the general public is stunned by his attack.

You can see milder versions of this all the time in training classes. Most often, we’ll see an expression of distaste on a dog’s face while an oblivious owner does something he thinks the dog loves. Whether they’re slapping a touch-sensitive dog on the head (“Gosh, she just loves this,” the owner says while the dog grimaces and turns her head away) or shouting “Good dog!” to a cringing, sound-sensitive Cocker Spaniel, otherwise loving owners commonly miss expressions as obvious as fireworks to people with experience.

Although I know of no research on our ability to interpret the facial expressions of dogs, there’s a lot of research on our ability to read the faces of other people, and much of what we’ve learned can help us better understand our dogs. For example, study after study shows that the more training you receive about the meaning of facial expressions, the subtler the signals you’ll be able to read. A good example is our ability
to detect deceit in others, surely a behavior with which we’ve all had a lot of experience. The easiest form of dishonesty to learn to detect is an insincere smile. Natural smiles go far beyond the mouth and affect the muscles around the eyes, but insincere ones usually only include movements of the mouth. Most of us aren’t aware of the difference on our own faces, but extreme examples are easy to spot on others, and with training you can get really good at seeing subtle examples.

The reason most of us aren’t as good as we’d like to be at identifying dishonest expressions is that we haven’t been taught to look for the subtle changes in facial expressions that are usually generated by even accomplished liars. The best human lie detectors are U.S. Secret Service agents, CIA agents, and clinical psychologists who study lying. These are the only groups of people who can reliably detect dishonesty, and it’s their training and experience that give them this advantage. The rest of us aren’t as good at it as we think we are. Parents take note.

The more training and experience you have at reading expressions in dogs or people, the more your brain is able to focus on the important signals and ignore the extraneous ones. At any given moment, your brain is flooded with information, only some of which is relevant to any particular issue. In many situations, it turns out all you really need is a tiny piece of information, as long as it’s the right piece. Called thin-slicing by the researchers who discovered it, it’s the equivalent of finding your lost wedding ring in the woods, because your brain is focused on “sparkly” and is ignoring everything else. The dog trainers who watched the video of the dog about to lunge were thin-slicing, because they knew that, in that context, “freezing with a closed mouth” was the only thing they needed to see to predict the attack.

Thin-slicing is best illustrated by the work of psychologist John Gottman, who has been studying interactions between married couples for decades.
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After eavesdropping on more than three thousand couples, Gottman can listen to a couple chatting about nothing in particular for an hour, and then predict, with 95 percent accuracy, whether they’ll still be married in fifteen years. Other people, even marriage counselors, aren’t able to do any better than guessing, because they haven’t learned which visual or verbal expressions signify a healthy relationship. After years of analyzing tiny changes in expression and tone of voice, Gottman and his colleagues have found that signs of defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt are red flags that trouble is brewing. But all they really need to see is the expression of contempt by one of the partners (picture someone ever-so-slightly rolling his eyes) to know that the marriage is doomed. No matter how many times the members of a couple smile at each other, laugh, or cuddle, if one suggests contempt for the other with the subtlest of expressions, they might as well call the lawyer and get it over with.

These results represent far more than just some trendy pop psychology that makes interesting reading. There’s overwhelming evidence from a variety of studies that experienced observers are able to make accurate judgments about the feelings of others, based on amazingly small samples of their behavior. The psychologist Elisha Babad and his colleagues found that viewers needed only ten seconds of a video clip to accurately judge whether a teacher liked the child to whom he or she was talking. The teachers themselves were quite sure that they were concealing their feelings, but their faces gave them away. That’s because, more than any other muscles, the muscles of the face are hard to control consciously—our eyebrows can change the tiniest bit when we’re concerned, angry, or frightened, but we don’t consciously decide to make those movements in the same way that we decide to move our arm.

It’s hard to consciously control your facial muscles because they are intimately connected with the emotional centers of your brain. Much of this wiring bypasses the rational, thinking part of your brain altogether, so the process of conscious decision making is out of the loop. That’s why face-to-face contact is always the best way to communicate, and why behaviorists and trainers always want to meet your dog face-to-face. Our species’ ability to use language may allow us to say anything
we want (whether it’s true or not), but our faces remain more honest indicators of our internal emotional state.

Somebody came to my office once, on an ostensibly friendly visit, and I’ll never forget seeing his eyes go cold and hard while at the same time he was complimenting me. I knew instantly that the words were meaningless, because the message on his face expressed his real feelings. Those feelings weren’t pretty—they made the hair stand up on the back of my neck—but at least I had gotten an accurate view of how he really felt.

The eyes of my not-so-friendly visitor were icy cold, but I don’t think I would have been so aware of them if I hadn’t seen that same expression in the eyes of dogs who are about to bite. Seventeen years of reading the faces of dogs who may be about to bite me has made me much better at reading the faces of people. Other trainers have the same experience—it’s so common that we swap stories at conferences about how our improved ability to read faces has helped us through tricky negotiations with an increased awareness of a person’s true feelings, regardless of the words he or she uses. That wouldn’t be true if we humans didn’t share many basic expressions of emotions with our dogs. The faces of dogs are almost as plastic as our own, able to morph from disappointment to joy in the blink of an eye. We read our dogs’ faces as we read the faces of people, looking for information about how they’re feeling and what they might be about to do. Experience may improve our ability to read between the lines, but, as Darwin reminded us a long time ago, the basic emotions of fear, anger, joy, and disgust look the same on the faces of our dogs as on the faces of our human family.

It’s no coincidence that highly social animals like people and dogs have exceptionally expressive faces. Solitary animals, pandas, for example, have relatively impassive faces that make it difficult to figure out how they’re feeling. That makes sense, because if you’re a solitary animal, it doesn’t matter whether others are able to evaluate your emotions: there are no “others” to begin with. But if you live in a tight-knit group, it matters greatly whether you’re scared or frustrated, because your emotions are excellent predictors of what you’ll do next—handy information when you are affected by the behavior of those around you. Emotional expressions act like lubricants in social interactions, and the more important your behavior is to those around you, the
more important it is that they are able to read your emotions from your expressions.

Thus, the expression of emotion, and the ability to read it, aren’t random—they’re crucial components of a social relationship in which the partners can choose how to behave. The participants in a complex social relationship must be able to take the emotional temperatures of their partners, and that’s hard to do if the emotions are hidden inside. The important role of emotional expressions in social relationships is highly relevant to our interactions with dogs. Dogs behave as though they expect us to be able to read their expressions accurately. When we don’t, either because we aren’t able to or because we aren’t paying attention, both dogs and people can get in a lot of trouble.

It makes sense to assume that our dogs’ expressions are honest indicators of their internal emotional states, just as in our own species. After all, the word “emotion” is mostly made of (and derived from) the word “motion,” and that turns out to be a telling relationship. An emotion, as described by the neurobiologist John Ratey, is a “movement outward, a way of communicating our most important internal states and needs.” As we discussed in Chapter 1, the expressive movements on our faces are part and parcel of our emotions—you simply can’t talk about them as if they were separate things. If you want to understand your dog’s emotions, you need to be able to read the expression on his face.

The rest of this chapter is designed to polish your ability to understand your dog’s emotional expressions. Although everyone gets better with practice, the good news is that we all have a solid foundation on which to build. In general, people are pretty darn good at reading intense emotions from the facial expressions of other people, no matter where they’re from or what language they speak. Paul Ekman, who has spent decades studying cross-cultural expressions of emotion, has found that anger, happiness, fear, surprise, sadness, and disgust look the same the world over. When he asked members of an isolated tribe in New Guinea to “pretend your child has died,” their faces moved into the same expression you’d see on the face of a Japanese computer programmer or an American shoe salesman if you had asked them the same
question. In spite of the vast cultural differences between people, we all express our basic emotions the same way.

Not only do our faces change in predictable ways when we’re happy or sad, our expressions are interpreted the same way on every continent. Dozens of studies show that people in many countries and cultures, including people in isolated hunter/gatherer tribes, make the same interpretations of photographs expressing basic emotions. Even children who have been blind from birth, who can’t possibly have learned by imitating others, express emotions that can be read correctly around the world. There are cultural differences in how likely individuals are to express basic emotions—the Japanese, for example, are less likely to express negative emotions than are Americans—but both cultures agree on what the emotions look like once they are expressed.

As we’ve discussed, many of these expressions are shared by dogs and people; but reading them through floppy ears and long, fuzzy muzzles can be a bit tricky.

Even people who’ve lived with dogs all their lives can benefit by training their brains to look for those important signals—to thin-slice—so that they can better understand what’s going on inside their dog’s head. It’s particularly valuable to learn to perceive and interpret what Paul Ekman calls “micro-expressions,” or fleeting and subtle indicators of emotion that require training to notice. The more skillful you get at this, the easier it will be to know when Buster isn’t comfortable being petted, so you can move on before his discomfort turns into a growl, snap, or bite. You’ll be able to see when your dog is starting to become stressed during a training exercise, and know it’s time to lighten things up or clarify his confusion. You’ll also be better at knowing when your dog is really, truly happy, and so you’ll get better at making him so.

One caveat before we move on to highlighting important expressions in dogs: there are a few things, unrelated to your dog’s actual emotions, that can influence your interpretation of her expressions, and it’s useful to keep them in mind. One is your own experience, which research has shown affects how you read another’s face. For example, in one study,
children who had been physically abused in the past were asked to label photographs of faces as fearful or angry. The facial expressions in the photos had been computer modified to combine equal amounts of both emotions. Abused children were much more likely than other children to label the faces as angry.

Additionally, it’s tempting to project your own emotions onto your dog. My dear mom, who loved both her dogs and the visits from her daughters, consistently pointed out that her dogs looked depressed during the last days of a daughter’s visit. “Look at poor Jenny,” she’d say. “She knows you’re leaving tomorrow and she’s just miserable about it.” A glance at Jenny found her sound asleep on the couch, looking exactly as she had the day before, and the day before that. Mom did this so much we began to tease her about it. She put up with our teasing, but I don’t think she ever stopped believing that, long before we got out the suitcases, her dogs knew our departure date and shared her feelings of sadness about it. Be careful, then, that you’re not projecting your own feelings on to your dog. Remember the advice in the first chapter, and use your skills of objective observation to read what your dog is trying to tell you with her facial expressions.

One last thing to remember is that the shape of your dog’s head also has an influence on your perceptions. Because of our extensive efforts to create designer dogs, your dog may have anything from the baby face of an American Cocker Spaniel to the grown-up, wolfy look of a Malamute. We know that people respond differently to a baby-faced person than to one who looks more grown-up. The key features that make faces look infantile or grown-up are the size of the forehead in relation to the rest of the face, and the size of the eyes. Babies have proportionately larger eyes and foreheads than adults, and if you change just the size of the forehead, keeping all else the same, you can change how people respond in a variety of circumstances. For example, all else being equal, we are more protective of people who have babylike faces, and we are less likely to judge them guilty of a crime. There is even evidence suggesting that a baby face inhibits aggression and elicits nurturance: the facial proportions of children who have been physically abused are emotional expressions
more likely to resemble those of older people than are the facial proportions of nonabused youngsters.