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

In fMRI of 24 awake companion dogs and 40 humans, bodily happiness and anger are encoded with an asymmetric neural representation, with happiness showing category-specific patterns.

• Why it matters: Visual emotion research in dogs has focused mainly on faces, leaving unclear how their brains represent affective information conveyed by human body expressions.
• What they did: Participants watched videos of bodily happiness, anger, and neutral actions plus phase-scrambled controls; body-selective regions showed emotion modulation and multivariate RSA patterns.
• The result: Happiness produced consistent category-specific neural patterns in both species, while anger lacked a comparable category effect yet remained distinguishable from happiness and neutral actions, with different cortical distributions.

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