They seem worried, don’t they?
They’re not. The Boston terrier was just chilling, the basset hound had just gone for a good wade in the creek and was having a fine time.
But all it takes is me saying “they look worried” and you can’t unsee it. Maybe you saw it yourself. It’s a testament to how we interpret faces and expressions even in other animals. The slight cast of an eye, the droop of an eyelid, gaze seemingly fixed on something off-camera, the cast of a mouth.
Dogs certainly have some intuitive sense that their facial expressions can attract human attention, and vice-versa, most of them seem able to read something out of human expressions and body language.
I don’t think dogs really lie with facial expressions the way that social primates do, or at least have a readable expression that is mismatched to some kind of internal cognitive disposition.
One thing that’s driven me nuts for years is reading about ongoing work by technologists to pair some kind of machine-trained AI with facial recognition systems in order to build a real-time agent that reacts to a human operator’s facial expressions and adjusts on the fly to the emotional mood of the operator. This is the worst idea that no one wants. I especially don’t want it as some kind of horrible rebirth of Clippy, with a little cartoon guy who pops up as I write and says “You seem angry, maybe you should wait to send this email until later?” I don’t particularly want any facial recognition technology, mind you, but I especially don’t want a technology that doesn’t understand a basic truth about human facial expressions, which is that we lie with our faces as much as we lie with our words. We smile when we’re not at all friendly or happy, we suppress sadness or anger from reaching our face, we exaggerate boredom or irritation to provoke. We have resting bitch faces and false exuberance. We perform, we mask.
And above all, we know better most of the time than to tell someone what we read on their face unless we are intimate with them. And even then, we’re careful to make sure it’s a welcome start of a supportive—or confrontational—conversation. “You seem upset, what’s wrong?” “Are you angry with me?” “Why is that funny?” So the last thing in the world I want is a computer doing that to me without knowing the rules about when to do it and when not to do it.
But it’s always ok to tell a dog what you think its face is showing, because the dog doesn’t care. Worried? Happy? Ready for a walk? Doesn’t matter, because in reading its face—or taking its picture—you’re paying attention to it, and that’s good enough.
I was just looking at this the other day...
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/landseer-king-charles-spaniels-the-cavaliers-pets-n00409