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A simple smile could make your dog's day. New research reveals that man's best friend can differentiate happy and angry human faces.

Researchers said that latest study is the first to provide concrete evidence that animals, other than humans, can distinguish emotional expressions of other species.

"We think the dogs in our study could have solved the task only by applying their knowledge of emotional expressions in humans to the unfamiliar pictures we presented to them," lead researcher Corsin Müller of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, said in a news release.

Dogs in the latest study were able to show that they could tell angry human faces from happy ones. Researchers noted that the dogs in the experiment were significantly more accurate than random chance.

"Our study demonstrates that dogs can distinguish angry and happy expressions in humans, they can tell that these two expressions have different meanings, and they can do this not only for people they know well, but even for faces they have never seen before," senior researcher Ludwig Huber, of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna's Messerli Research Institute, said in a statement.

"We expect to gain important insights into the extraordinary bond between humans and one of their favorite pets, and into the emotional lives of animals in general," Müller concluded.

The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.