Man's best friend is actually woman's best friend!
A new study has revealed women are more likely to understand what dogs are trying to say through their barking communication.
Researchers recorded 18 dogs growling in response to different situations - guarding food from other dogs, playing tug of war, or feeling threatened by the approach of a stranger.
Forty participants were then asked to identify the purpose of the dog’s growl based on fear, playfulness, aggression, despair and happiness.
And it turns out women are significantly more fluent in "dog" than men.
Tamás Faragó, the lead author of the study, explained: "Our recent fMRI studies suggest that dogs and humans use similar brain areas and probably similar processes to assess others' emotions from vocalisations".
"It seems that there are biologically rooted rules to how mammalian vocalisations encode emotions and these shared processes help humans to assess the emotional load of not just dogs but other mammal species' vocal emotion expressions".
"This is a common pattern in emotion recognition studies".
"Women are likely more empathic and sensitive to others' emotions and this helps them to better associate the contexts with the emotional content of the growls".