Literal Fur Babies: The Evolution of ‘Puppy Dog Eyes’
June 17th, 2019Via: AFP:
The researchers found two muscles around the eye were routinely present and well formed in the domestic dogs, but not the wolves, and only dogs produced high-intensity eyebrow movements as they gazed at the human.
“It makes the eye look larger, which is similar to human infants,” Professor Anne Burrows of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, who was one of the co-authors, told AFP. “It triggers a nurturing response in people.”
Since the muscles were robust in the dogs but not wolves, “that tells us that that muscle and its function are selected,” she added.
The current study was led by Juliane Kaminski at the University of Portsmouth and also included researchers from Howard University in Washington and North Carolina State University.
It builds on past work, including a notable 2015 paper by a group of researchers in Japan that demonstrated that gaze exchange between humans and their pet dogs led to a mutual spike in the so-called love hormone oxytocin, similar to an effect seen between human mothers and their babies.
It’d be interesting to see whether dogs also do this during dog-dog interactions.