Scientists say the innocent puppy dog eyes when they look at you as if to say something or need your attention can be the result of the evolution process to manipulate your feelings.
Researchers have found that over thousands of years, there has been some development in the muscle around the eyes of the dogs reshaping the eyebrows anatomy, which gives them an attractive, innocent look.
When dogs feel a person's focus on them, they usually raise their inner eyebrow muscle to make their eyes look larger and more appealing in a child-like state that encourages a "maternal reaction". The study says that this look helped the dogs with a strong link with humans.
Previous studies have shown how doglike facial expressions can be attractive to humans. According to researchers, this allows dogs to have "eyebrows expressing" that "creates the illusion of human-type communication."
"It seems that when dogs use this trick, it induces a great deal of courage in humans to care for them," said Dr. Julian Kaminsky, a researcher at the University of Portsmouth.
Moving the muscles makes the eyes of the dogs look "bigger and more like small children, and it's similar to the one we see when it comes to sadness."
Eyebrow movement has a major role in human communication, Kaminiski says: “I’m doing it now while I’m speaking to you, although I know you can’t see me."
This muscle exposes more of the white of the eye, while moves along the eye’s outer frame, making the dogs resemble human-like.
The "unconscious preference" of humans was to keep and nurse dogs that had such an attribute, he says. In this way, these dogs had an evolutionary advantage, and their number increased over the generations.
Dr. Kaminsky describes the evidence "convincing" in confirming this finding in his research paper, published in the journal "The National Academy of Sciences (NAS)" of the United States of America.
Earlier research has shown that this is more likely to occur in dogs when someone is looking at them. This shows that this is a deliberate behavior aimed at attracting human attention.
