Face pictures reduce behavioural, autonomic, endocrine and neural indices of stress and fear in sheep.

Abstract in brief

• The study found that viewing familiar sheep faces reduces stress indicators such as heart rate, cortisol, and adrenaline, as well as behavioral protests and vocalizations, especially during social isolation, indicating that face images can have a calming effect.
• Neural analysis showed that familiar faces influence specific brain regions involved in face recognition, emotional regulation, and fear processing, primarily on the right hemisphere, suggesting lateralization of emotional responses in mammals.
• These findings imply that face pictures may be useful for alleviating social stress in animals and potentially humans, highlighting a possible common feature of emotional processing in the mammalian brain related to right hemisphere dominance.]