Research shows dogs have human-like emotions
By Huffington Post
New research is telling the world something that dog owners have known all along — that canines have emotions just like humans.
Gregory Berns, a professor of neuroeconomics at Emory University, has spent the past two years training dogs to go into an MRI scanner “completely awake and unrestrained.”
Berns says the scans reveal that the structure and function of the caudate nucleus is similar in dog and human brains. In humans, the caudate activity spikes when we anticipate things we will enjoy like food or love.
In an op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times, Berns summed up the study’s conclusion thus: Dogs are people, too.
In his study, Berns and his colleagues tracked dogs’ caudate activities when they were shown a hand signal that meant they’d be getting a food reward.
