A smile can speak a thousand words but those words may
remain in the wilderness if the recipient doesn’t speak human. Of course
animals have many ways in which to interpret our emotions and
intentions. They can listen to our voices, smell our bodily chemicals,
touch us with their paws, hands and claws, taste us with their
overworked tongues and they can see us with observant eyes.
They can see us.
This final sense is quite curious when we are thinking
about animals watching us. What is it they are actually seeing? We know
they understand many forms of visible body language but what about our
faces? Is there any evidence they understand anything from our facial
expressions and if there is, what would they be basing their
understanding on? Is there anything we could do to aid their
understanding of our facial expressions? Racing ahead, what would any
inter-species facial communication between humans and animals mean for
possible future meetings with extra-terrestrials?
Let’s begin by looking at some of the evidence available.
In 2004, the Journal of Comparative Psychology published the results of a
study that showed dolphins instinctively comprehend human gazing to the
extent that they understand the difference between what the study
called static gazing and dynamic gazing. Static gazing being an idle
stare with no action required and dynamic gazing meaning a gaze that
prompted the dolphins to interact with an object. No verbal commands or
prior training were needed for the dolphins to comprehend the
difference.
If you think that’s impressive, check out the work of
Professor John Marzluff at the University of Washington in Seattle. In
2008, Professor Marzluff led a group of researchers for a walk in the
park. He separated the group in to two teams with one team wearing a
particular type of mask and the other team wearing another type. The
park has a population of crows and one team were charged with trapping
the crows while the second team were just asked to walk on by. In 2013,
Marzluff led two teams with the same masks in to the same park. The
team wearing the masks that were worn during the trapping of 2008 were
ambushed by shrieking, hysterical crows, many of whom were not even
present at the original trapping five years earlier.
Marzluff also worked with Dr. Barbara Clucas of Humboldt
State University on a study that proved that American crows react
differently to approaching people according to whether or not the person
is gazing at them or away from them. If an approaching person is
looking at them, they take off a lot faster. Interestingly, whether the
person is smiling or scowling seemed irrelevant.
Dr. Clucas also has experience studying squirrels in
unrelated studies. Aside from gazing, I asked Dr. Clucas if there was
any evidence that some crows or squirrels interpret human facial
expressions in a particular way.
“Apart from that study with crows, I have not done other
studies on the topic. Anecdotally, I have noticed similar behaviour in
other bird species (ravens, jays, etc). Although I haven't tested it in
squirrels, I would suspect that because their vision is not as good as
that of birds, they probably wouldn't be able to detect if a human eyes
were looking at them versus looking the other way. They might react to a
human whose face is facing them versus being turned away. Indeed there
are many studies showing that mammals and reptiles react differently
when a human face is facing them.”
There was a study published earlier this year which showed
some dogs understood the differences between human faces showing anger
and those showing happiness. I wondered, regardless of what animals
would understand from our facial expressions, what might their
interpretations be based upon? Dr. Kun Guo of the University of Lincoln
in the UK, has done a lot of research on interactions between animals
and humans so I thought he would be a good man to ask.
“Very good question. ‘Don’t know’ will be our current
answer. If I have to guess, I will say ‘based on the interaction
between innate bias and prior learning from humans through experience /
development’. You need to test wolf (evolutionary approach) and puppy
(developmental approach) to answer this.”
We have established that crows can recognize and remember
human faces and they can also comprehend targeted and untargeted gazing.
The evidence that they can decipher human facial expressions is limited
but there are hints that this might be the case. I asked Dr. Clucas
what might they be basing their interpretations of human facial
expressions on?
“Well, I didn't find that the American crows responded
differently to a smiling versus scowling face, however, laboratory
studies have shown that a related species, jungle crows can discriminate
male and female faces as well as a smiling face from a blank face. So I
believe American crows likely are capable of learning to distinguish
facial expressions. They are likely capable of such things because they
are very social and use visual signals in their own conspecific
communication (within species communication).”
While conducting the research for this article, I learned
that the mere idea that our facial expressions represent emotions at all
is not a universally accepted fact. Dr Eliza Bliss-Moreau of the
University of California has done a lot of work with rhesus monkeys and
people interacting together. I asked her some questions on her work but
she had a question for me: “Are you familiar with the large human
literature which calls into question the fact that faces represent
emotions at all? Your questions are all predicated on the idea that
emotions correspond to faces in a one-to-one way, and therefore emotions
can be "read". But that's not the case.”
Clearly, there are a lot of barriers between inter-species
communication and this includes facial expressions. So is there anything
we can do to help animals understand our faces better? Many domestic
cats have an image of being cold in nature due to them consistently
presenting straight faces but it has actually be proven that this
usually means they are in a relaxed state. I asked Dr. Guo if mimicking
their facial expressions be useful to relay our intentions?
“Very interesting thoughts. It could work if we can
understand animal’s emotion first and the relations between animal’s
emotion and their facial expression. Some animals, like cats, have
limited ranges of facial muscle movements, which make their facial
expressions less informative about their emotion / feeling / mood.”
I think this is a subject worthy of further exploration,
especially in an age when we are now putting some serious money into
searching for extra-terrestrial life in the universe. What if some
intelligent life in the universe does not use verbal language? Carl
Sagan once made the valid point that dolphins have learned to understand
many words in English but no human has ever learned one word of
Dolphinese. Until we do that, it could be useful to study animal
understanding of our facial expressions more, even if only to eliminate
possibilities of facial communication between species.
And don’t mess with the crows man.
