HABRI Central

Kujala (2017) reviews a topic of major relevance for the understanding of the special dog-human relationship: canine emotions (as seen through human social cognition). This commentary draws attention to the communication of emotions within such a particular social context. It highlights challenges that need to be tackled to further advance research on emotional communication, and it calls for new avenues of research. Efforts to disentangle emotional processes from cognitive functioning might be necessary to better comprehend how they contribute, alone and/or in combination, to the communication of emotions. Also, new research methods need to be developed to account for the rich sensory repertoire of dogs, likely involved in emotional communication.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

1. Animal roles
2. Dogs
3. Emotions
4. Human-animal communication
5. Mammals
6. open access
7. Pets and companion animals