Redefining Human-Dog Relations: "Puppy Dog Eyes" (INTRODUCTION)

We all know how important faces can be in capturing our attention, and how powerful facial expression can be in any social interaction.

Well, your doggo at home knows that pretty well too!

Be it when you came back home to find all your shoes chewed up and you were just about to scold your dog, or you were going to have that last bite of your favourite snack all by yourself and your dog just raised the eyebrows and gave you that innocent, soulful look and boom your heart just melted!

Well, this is just no accident!

Surprised? Read on...

Dr. Juliane Kaminski, a comparative psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, in her previous research has found that dogs are uniquely skilled at understanding gestures, outperforming even non-human primates like chimps.

In one experiment, published in 2013 she filmed shelter dogs to see if any of their behaviours were linked to how quickly the animal was adopted.

Of all the factors that Kaminski examined, only one was most significant:

It was not the tail wagging or the speed at which dogs bounded over to visiting humans. But the dog's eyebrow movement-upwards and inwards that appealed the most!!!

● Thus, it was confirmed by the new research, dogs have evolved a new muscle around the eyes, named the Levator Anguli Oculi Medialis, or LAOM over thousands of years, just to communicate with their "hoomans"!

The research team, led by Kaminski, included a team of behavioural and anatomical experts in the UK and USA and the study got published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

But how can we be sure that this was a result of evolution?

Soft tissue, including muscle, doesn't tend to survive in the fossil record, making the study of this type of evolution harder.

To investigate how the look developed in dogs, the UK-US research team acquired wolf and dog cadavers from taxidermists and US state organisations and dissected their heads to compare the facial muscles.

Dissections of six dogs –

a chihuahua,

a labrador,

a bloodhound,

a German shepherd,

a Siberian husky, and

a mongrel

– found all had the LAOM muscle.

But in the four grey wolves studied, the muscle was missing, except for a few scant muscle fibres.

Since all dogs are derived from wolves, the comparison suggests the LAOM arose in the domestication process.

Only one other difference was noted in the head dissections. A muscle called the Retractor Anguli Oculi Lateralis (RAOL), which pulls the eyelids out towards the ears, was less prominent in wolves than dogs.

The Siberian husky, one of the most ancient breeds, was the only dog found to lack the RAOL muscle.

In dogs, this new muscle (LAOM) allow them to intensely raise their inner eyebrows, thus triggering a nurturing response in humans because it makes the dogs' eyes appear larger, more infant-like and also resemble a movement that we, humans produce when we are sad(although we use different muscles)! This is why we can actually understand what they are trying to express and it brings out the caregiver in us!!

This is quite significant as it not only strengthens the human-dog bond but also creates the illusion of human-like communication.

After establishing that dogs and wolves have different muscles around the eyes(a striking difference for species separated only 33,000 years),

the researchers filmed the animals to see how their expressions varied.

They filmed nine wolves in two different animal parks, and 27 dogs, mostly Staffordshire bull terriers, in shelters across the UK. The footage was reviewed by a trained specialist (who was not told about the scientists’ hypothesis)who rated the intensity of the expressions on a five-point scale.

Dogs pulled the doleful face far more frequently than wolves, but the most striking finding was the intensity of the expressions. While dogs and wolves both produced “low intensity” expressions, only dogs appear to have weaponised the look and achieved what the scientists classified as “high-intensity expressions”.

The findings suggest that expressive eyebrows in dogs may be a result of humans unconscious preferences that influenced selection during domestication. This would give dogs, that move their eyebrows more, a selection advantage over others and reinforce the 'puppy dog eyes' trait for future generations.

Now you know from where your doggo got that "look" from!!