事実関係
解説と影響
这项研究首次从神经科学层面证实了犬类对情绪信号的解码能力并非简单的条件反射。当研究人员让狗狗接触带有不同情绪色彩的人类声音或气味样本时，其大脑中负责处理情感信息的区域，例如尾状核和杏仁核，会呈现出与人类相似但又独具特点的激活模式。这意味着，当你感到害怕或难过时，你的宠物犬可能并不是仅仅通过观察你的肢体动作来判断，而是其大脑在生理层面真实地“感受”到了你的情绪状态。原文未提供该研究的具体样本量或实验细节。
这一发现为理解跨物种情感交流提供了新的视角。长期以来，养狗人士普遍相信自己的伙伴能感知情绪，但科学界对此一直缺乏直接的神经生物学证据。此次利用功能性磁共振成像技术对清醒状态下的狗进行脑部扫描，成功捕捉到了情绪处理的动态过程，使得“狗通人性”的说法有了更坚实的科学根基。研究团队指出，这种脑活动模式的差异表明，犬类可能拥有一种基础的情绪分类能力，这或许是它们在数千年驯化过程中，为更好地与人类共生而演化出的关键技能。
参考資料
出典原文
Any dog owner would tell you that their canine companions are attuned to their humans' emotional state and respond accordingly. Scientists have performed fMRI scans on dogs and identified a specific brain region that processes happy human facial expresses, like a smile, according to a new paper published in the journal iScience. They also found that dogs can tell the difference between negative facial expressions, specifically anger, sadness, and fear.
“Humans are really good at picking up small details on the face, and so are dogs,” said co-author Raúl Hernández-Pérez of the University of Vienna. “This makes dogs very interesting. By studying their brains, we can understand what adaptations have developed to support their remarkable social and emotional understanding of humans.”
Prior behavioral studies have shown that dogs are sensitive to emotion in human faces. Dogs will, for example, choose a box their human has identified with a happy expression over one the human treats with fear or disgust. Past fMRI studies found that an area in the canine left temporal cortex showed a stronger response to human faces compared to dog faces, as well as a greater response in the caudate, hippocampus, and amygdala to human faces showing emotion versus neutral faces.