It’s official - women understand their dogs better than men.
And with more dogs in Northern Ireland per head than any other part of the UK, there appears to be plenty of chat going on between the ladies and their pooches.
A study published by the Royal Society of Open Science states that women are more likely to understand what man’s best friend actually wants to communicate.
Researchers discovered that people can pick up on what dogs are attempting to communicate when they growl, and that women are more fluent in "dog" than men.
In the small scale study, they recorded 18 dogs growling in response to different situations such as feeling threatened, playing and guarding food or toys plus feeling threatened by the approach of a human stranger.
Forty study male and female participants were then asked to identify the tone using a sliding scale the dog’s growl for fear, playfulness, aggression, despair and happiness.
They then tried to determine the context of the growl.
And they presented a 63% success rate of identifying the context of the growl and the researchers found women fared best.
Tamás Faragó, the lead author of the study, said: “Women are likely more empathic and sensitive to others’ emotions and this helps them to better associate the contexts with the emotional content of the growls.
“Our recent fMRI studies suggest that dogs and humans use similar brain areas and probably similar processes to assess others’ emotions from vocalisations.
“It seems that there are biologically rooted rules to how mammalian vocalisations encode emotions and these shared processes help humans to assess the emotional load of not just dogs but other mammal species’ vocal emotion expressions. This is a common pattern in emotion recognition studies.”
