In partnership with
Dogs are a human’s best friend and considering the malice and acts of violence that we as a species commit, against our own kind; the statement holds quite true. Our furry companions have co-existed alongside us for thousands of years serving multiple roles. From herding livestock, hunting, retrieving, and guarding to modern-day tasks such as detecting drugs at airports (umm..), identifying early signs of disease, and providing emotional support, the benefits that dogs offers are only increasing.
A dog-human relationship combines the upsides of best-friend relationships and parent-child bonds, which can make it more supportive and positive than many relationships between human. Hence, this issue is dedicated to my 11 year old beagle boi: Tuffy, who loves his carrots and sticks (see what I did there?). Below are three studies that highlights the latest research on dog-human interaction and how dogs continue to be the species we can depend upon.
a squeaky carrot 😆
Dogs may be better at reading us than we think
We know that dogs respond differently to how we’re feeling but is it only conditioned behaviour or have their brains evolved to actually tell these emotions apart? Hernández-Pérez et al. (2026) put awake, trained pet dogs inside an fMRI scanner and showed them human faces expressing happiness, anger, fear, and sadness. In one experiment, eight dogs viewed happy and neutral faces; in another, twelve dogs viewed the four different emotional expressions.
What did they find?
Happy faces produced a distinct pattern of brain activity compared to the negative expressions.
More interestingly, dogs’ whole-brain activity could also distinguish fear from anger and fear from sadness.
This suggests that dogs are not simply sorting our faces into “good” and “bad” but their brains may represent some specific human emotions differently.
Across human facial expressions, happiness has the strongest representation in the dog brain. The next time you see a doggo, just smile and it’s going to be a rewarding experience for the two of you. The doggo brain is pretty darn smart and it’s happiest when you’re happy.
resting bitch face? 🙃
But… are we any good at reading them?
It’s funny how people quickly come to conclusions about why their dog is behaving in a specific manner or how they must be feeling. "Look at him, he knows he did something wrong, he’s def feeling guilty about peeing on the carpet." Well... maybe we should be slightly less confident, also RIP carpet.
Across two experiments (Molinaro & Wynne, 2025) involving 383 and 485 undergraduate participants were shown videos of a dog experiencing situations intended to be positive or negative. Sometimes viewers saw the surrounding context; other times the background was removed or even replaced with a mismatched situation.
What did they find? - that context matters!
People’s ratings of the dog's emotional state changed depending on what was happening around the dog.
When the surrounding human appeared to be doing something positive, participants tended to judge the dog more positively even when that context did not match the situation in which the dog had originally been filmed.
In other words, we may sometimes be reading the scene rather than reading the dog itself.
The paper has an appropriately title: “Barking Up the Wrong Tree,” which in research terminology is referred to as a creative title. To conclude, doggos are getting better information from our faces than we are getting from theirs, read a book or watch Caesar Milan or smth :0
The human–dog connection is universal!!
Bräuer et al. (2026) | Scientific Reports
There is one problem with a lot of what we know about dogs: much like psychology research on humans, dog research has predominantly studied participants from WEIRD societies which stands for Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic.
Bräuer et al. (2026) studied 164 hunting dog–owner pairs across five rural societies in Germany, Vanuatu, Mongolia, Madagascar, and Peru. Dogs completed six social-cognitive tasks covering things such as following human pointing, communicating about hidden food, looking towards humans when faced with an unsolvable problem, and social referencing. Owners also answered questions about their relationship with their dogs.
Setup of the six tests: (a) Obedience test, (b) Pointing test, (c) Showing test, (d) Perspective taking test, (e) Unsolvable problem test, (f) Social referencing test.
Despite the huge cultural differences, the similarities stood out.
Dogs across societies successfully used human pointing gestures to find hidden food.
Dog–owner pairs could communicate about the location of hidden food.
Dogs commonly looked towards humans when faced with uncertain or difficult situations.
More than 90% of owners in every country said they could rely on their dog and believed their dog would try to protect them in a threatening situation.
There were some cultural differences too. German dogs, for example, tended to be more obedient (ahem ahem), while owners in Vanuatu were particularly good at interpreting their dogs’ signals, potentially reflecting differences in training and hunting practices. The larger finding remained rather wholesome: even across dramatically different cultures and ways of living with dogs, the basic social connection between humans and dogs looked remarkably similar.
tuffy in his prime 🥰
Granola Runs Revenue On Attio
"When I think of revenue, I think of Attio." - Shreman Shrestha, Head of Business at Granola
Here's what that adds up to:
Zero missed leads and 10x faster access to customer context
Lead triage 83% faster
Five hours saved per week with automated updates