Do humans do a good job of understanding the emotions on a dog's face? Can we draw valid conclusions about what a dog is feeling, experiencing, or his propensity for aggression from facial clues? And does having a lot of experience with dogs help us "read" dogs better?

Those questions were the subject of a study recently published in the journal Behavioural Processes. Working with a well-trained police dog named Mal and three experienced dog handlers, researchers took photographs of a number of canine facial expressions associated with experiences such as being praised, played with, reprimanded, ignored, and more.

They found that humans are pretty accurate at associating a facial expression with an activity — for instance, both experienced and inexperienced dog people had a high rate of correctly identifying the facial expression associated with playing ball — but some emotional expressions are not as easy for us to interpret. For instance, both groups of people scored below chance on the dog's look of disgust when given medicine he found distasteful.

Additionally, they found that experienced dog people were less accurate at identifying aggression than inexperienced people.

The complete study can be viewed for 24 hours for $3.99 at the link below.

Bloom T, Friedman H. Classifying dogs’ (Canis familiaris) facial expressions from photographs. Behavioural Processes. 2013;96:1-10.