Babies Can Tell The Difference Between Friendly Barks And Aggressive Ones

Parents, including me, tend to find their own babies’ accomplishments amazing, no matter how mundane the tales may seem to everybody else. Now, a new scientific study in the July 2009 issue of the journal Developmental Psychology confirms what parents often say: Babies can understand a lot more than we give them credit for.

According to this study, babies can tell the difference between friendly dog barks and threatening dog barks, and they can do this from as early as six months of age. The babies in the study were presented with two pictures of the same dog. In one picture the dog was in a friendly stance with a relaxed facial expression and in the other the dog was in an aggressive posture with a threatening facial expression. The researchers then played a two-second clip of a dog barking. If the bark was a friendly one, the babies directed their attention to the friendly photo but if it was the aggressive bark that they heard, they looked at the aggressive photo.

It’s not clear whether the babies are able to figure out which sorts of dogs—those exhibiting friendly signs or those sending off aggressive cues—would make the best possible playmates and which should be avoided. This study simply provides evidence that babies can make links between auditory cues from dogs and visual information from them and figure out which sounds go with which visual images.

The results suggest that babies can understand emotions before they can talk, and they can understand those emotions in another species, even if they have had little or no prior experience with dogs. For those of us who feel as though we have been able to understand dogs since before our earliest memories, there’s now scientific backup for those claims!

 --Karen B. London

Comments

[Randall Johnson]

Excellent post. It seems that scientific studies are now proving that babies understand more than parents have given them credit for and dogs understand more than scientists have given them credit for. For the record, I am a parent--my son is 6--AND dog caretaker, which is very much like being a parent, too.