Species-dependent gazing behavior of emotional facial expressions in dogs (Canis familiaris) and adult humans (Homo sapiens).

Emotional expressions play an important part in social communication of dogs and humans, but comparative studies between dogs and humans are rare. In addition, little is known about how emotions are perceived across species and how attention is divided among different parts of faces. Here, we compared the gazing behavior of dogs and adult humans toward emotional dog and human facial expressions. Dogs mostly gazed at the eye and nose areas, whereas the humans' focus also included the mouth area. The gazing behavior of both species was affected by the facial expressions and species presented, and they gazed at emotional more than neutral stimuli. Dogs and humans demonstrated attentional bias toward angry and happy eyes of their own species, which highlights the ecological salience of the species and the importance of eyes in reading conspecifics' emotional expressions. For both species, mouths of aggressive dogs were gazed at more than those of angry humans, whereas mouths of happy humans were gazed at more than happy dog mouths. Thus, the mouth area provides important emotional cues for recognizing emotions across species, suggesting the ecological salience of facial expressions connecting to the subcortical visual pathway across mammalian species. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).