Any dog owner would tell you that their canine companions are attuned to their humans' emotional state and respond accordingly. Scientists have performed fMRI scans on dogs and identified a specific brain region that processes happy human facial expresses, like a smile, according to a new paper published in the journal iScience. They also found that dogs can tell the difference between negative facial expressions, specifically anger, sadness, and fear.

“Humans are really good at picking up small details on the face, and so are dogs,” said co-author Raúl Hernández-Pérez of the University of Vienna. “This makes dogs very interesting. By studying their brains, we can understand what adaptations have developed to support their remarkable social and emotional understanding of humans.”

Prior behavioral studies have shown that dogs are sensitive to emotion in human faces. Dogs will, for example, choose a box their human has identified with a happy expression over one the human treats with fear or disgust. Past fMRI studies found that an area in the canine left temporal cortex showed a stronger response to human faces compared to dog faces, as well as a greater response in the caudate, hippocampus, and amygdala to human faces showing emotion versus neutral faces.

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Jason Semprini was excited about his research on policies mandating that elementary school students receive the human papillomavirus vaccine. HPV causes most cases of cervical cancer, but counterintuitively, Semprini found that mandates don’t do that much to reduce the overall rate of cervical cancer in a population. That’s odd, but it's also not completely surprising—we know that mandating a vaccine can motivate some people to find ways to avoid it.

Semprini wrote up the study and submitted the manuscript to a journal, where it was sent out for peer review, a long-standing process through which other researchers in the field assess the validity of research and make a recommendation on whether or not it should be published. This is usually done anonymously and on a volunteer basis.

In this case, the reviewer did not share Semprini’s excitement. That may have stemmed from a misunderstanding of the study’s central message: The reviewer mistakenly thought Semprini was questioning whether the HPV vaccine itself prevents cervical cancer rather than studying the effectiveness of a policy meant to increase vaccination rates. “There’s a very big difference there,” said Semprini, who is a health economist at Des Moines University.

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