Babies Detect Different Emotions in Dogs, Music

July 21, 2009 -- A pair of new studies on human babies reveals that six-month-old infants can detect basic emotions when listening to two distinct sounds: barking dogs and Beethoven's music.

Together, the studies suggest babies recognize and respond to the tone of what's going on around them long before they master speech.

"We think that infants have the capacity to discriminate and recognize emotion in a variety of contexts," lead author Ross Flom told Discovery News.

"Early researchers often focused, and rightly so, on human faces and voices, and now we are seeing evidence that infants discriminate and recognize emotion in a variety of domains -- music and now canine expressions," added Flom, a professor of psychology at Brigham Young University.

For the research that involved dogs, Flom and colleagues Daniel Hyde and Heather Whipple first showed 128 boy and girl infants pictures of the same dog, with one picture depicting the dog in an aggressive posture and another photo showing the dog in a friendly stance.

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Next, the researchers played, in random order, sound clips of a friendly, playful dog barking and an aggressive dog barking.

"They only had one trial, because we didn't want them to learn it on the fly and figure it out," Flom explained.

As the recordings played, the six-month-old babies spent most of their time staring at the appropriate picture. Other studies have proven that this staring is a baby's way of making a connection. The babies therefore correctly matched each dog bark to its corresponding photo.

The findings are published in the journal Developmental Psychology.