What's a surefire way to make a bad day a little bit better? Dog owners might say it's time spent with humankind's furry best friends. And according to a new study, your pet dog may be happy to help.
Previous research has shown that when humans cry, their dogs also feel distress. Now, the new study finds that dogs not only feel distress when they see that their owners are sad but will also try to do something to help.
The findings were published today (July 24) in the journal Learning and Behavior.
In the study, the researchers brought 34 pet dogs of various breeds and sizes into the lab, along with their owners. The owners were asked to sit (good human!) behind a glass door, where the dogs could see and hear them, and to say, "Help," every 15 seconds, in either a monotone or a distressed voice. [In Photos: America's Favorite Pets]
In the trials in which the pet owners were acting out a nondistressed state, they were told to hum "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" in between their calls for help. Meanwhile, in the trials where they acted distressed, they were told to make crying sounds in between their calls. The researchers took a video of how the dogs behaved in both scenarios and measured the dogs' heart rates for variability between beats, which could indicate stress.
What's more, the dogs were also able to get through to door to their owners: The door was held shut by three small magnets, so to open it, the dogs just had to lightly touch it, such as with their paws or noses.
The researchers found that dogs didn't open the door more often when their owners cried than when they hummed. "Dogs want to be with their owners, so even in our condition where the dogs were exposed to humming, they still about half the time went to their owners," said senior study author Julia Meyers-Manor, an assistant professor of psychology at Ripon College.
But the dogs who did open the door opened it about 40 seconds faster when their owners were crying compared with when the owners were humming, Meyers-Manor said.
In addition, by comparing the behaviors of the dogs as they saw and heard their owners cry with how they normally behaved, the researchers found that dogs who pushed through the door showed less stress than those who didn't enter the door. The researchers quantified this via the rate of "stressful behaviors" the dogs exhibited per second.
"It seems like the dogs [who didn't go through the door] would get more and more stressed by the crying but that they then sort of became paralyzed and [were] not able to do anything," Meyers-Manor told Live Science. But she noted that the scientists saw a huge range of behaviors, including other dogs who were indifferent to their owners' cries.
The researchers noted that they found some variability in the heart rate of the stressed dogs as well, but this data was a bit more difficult to interpret, as you typically need about 2 minutes of data to get a good reading, Meyers-Manor said. However, in some cases, the researchers got only around 20 seconds before the dogs opened the door, ending the trial.
Another limitation of the study could be the varying abilities of the humans to act out signs of distress, the authors wrote. In other words, some people were bad at acting.
The impossible task
The final part of the study was a challenge called "impossible task," which measures the strength of a dog's bond with its owner. In this task, the dogs were shown into a room where their owner and a stranger stood on opposite sides of a testing apparatus. Both the owners and the strangers stood still and stared diagonally across the room; they didn't make eye contact with the dog. The dogs were taught to move a jar on the apparatus in order to retrieve food underneath it. After a couple of trials, the jar was then screwed onto its lid, so that the dogs couldn't retrieve the food.
The researchers found that in that last case, the dogs who had opened the door when they heard their owners crying spent more time gazing at their owners after unsuccessfully trying to retrieve the food than the dogs who didn't open the door. This may suggest that "openers in the distress condition may have a stronger bond with their owner than nonopeners," and the result is opposite for the task which involved humming, the researchers wrote. In the condition where the owner was humming, the dogs who didn't open the door gazed more at their owners than the dogs who did open the door.
And why did dogs with stronger bonds more often open the door when their owners were crying and less often when they were humming? That result may be "reflective of empathy," the authors wrote.
But it's difficult to conclude that for sure, Meyers-Manor said. And as to whether dogs want to help their owners or just want to alleviate their own sadness — that remains unclear.
Previous research has shown that dogs also show distress when they hear a stranger cry or a baby cry on a recording, Meyers-Manor said. "I think that they have a general response to this crying, but I think that taking the action to do the rescue may be a little bit more dependent on [the] relationship [with their owners]," she added.
This study "helps support what many owners already feel," Meyers-Manor said, "[that] their dogs are responsive to them when they are distressed … and that they try to take action to alleviate that" distress.
Originally published on Live Science.
Wonder no more if your dog knows that you’re mad he or she used your favorite slippers as a toilet; a new study shows Fido may have an idea of how you feel.
A group of researchers trained a group of 11 dogs to differentiate between angry and happy human faces. During the study, the dogs were shown either the upper or lower half of a person’s face in various emotional states, according to Live Science. Then, to test the dogs, researchers showed them different images than the ones used in training, using either a different half of a face the dogs already saw or an altogether new person’s top or lower face.
In the end, the researchers found that dogs rewarded for picking happy faces more quickly learned how to tell happy and angry faces apart than those rewarded for picking angry faces. That, according to the study’s abstract, “would be predicted if the dogs recognized an angry face as an aversive stimulus.”
The researchers are confident that based on their results, and the results of other, less conclusive attempts, some dogs are able to differentiate between human expressions.
“With our study, which was inspired by these previous attempts, we think we can now confidently conclude that at least some dogs can discriminate human facial expressions,” Corsin Müller, an animal-behavior researcher at Messerli Research Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and the author of the study, told Live Science. Müller’s study was published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
[Live Science]
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Though dogs have been hanging out with us humans for at least 16,000 years, we know surprisingly little about them, especially when it comes to their emotions. Just last month, researchers found that hugging your dog can sometimes stress the crap out of them, and now a new study suggests that your dog might actually stop trusting you when you’re mad.
It's news to exactly no one that dogs can read our emotions, but this is the first time that researchers have looked into how our canine friends actually respond to our changing moods, and things don’t look good, especially if you get upset easily.
For the study, psychology professor Ross Flom from Brigham Young University conducted two experiments where he examined how dogs reacted to both positive and negative emotions.
First, he watched how dogs reacted to a pointing gesture while the person pointing acted happy. Next, he observed the dogs' reactions to a person using an angry tone while pointing.
When the person pointed to an area, the dog would know to explore it to find whatever the person was pointing at. This action, according to Flom, shows that the dog trusts the person enough to explore an unknown area for the first time. Based on how fast the dog reacted to this cue, Flom was able to determine its level of trust.
When all was said and done, he found that the dogs delayed their reactions when the pointer was visibly angry. This suggests that dogs do not trust their human masters as much when they're perceived to be mad. Flom also reports that, compared to the control group, positive vocal cues did not increase the dog’s reaction times, but negative emotions significantly delayed them.
Flom concludes that dogs use our tone and emotion to determine how fast to follow an order. The strange thing is that, even if the speaker is angry, the dog will always follow the pointing gesture, which you can see in the video below:
As Flom puts it:
"Together these results suggest that the addition of affective information does not significantly increase or decrease dogs' point-following behaviour. Rather these results demonstrate that the presence or absence of affective expressions influences a dogs' exploratory behaviour and the presence or absence of reward affects whether they will follow an unfamiliar adult’s attention-directing gesture."
So what’s the takeaway here? Well, for us everyday dog owners, the real lesson is that if you want your dog to react to your commands as fast as possible, you should speak to them in a normal or happy tone. Otherwise, the response is delayed, because you’re probably freaking it out a bit with your grumpy voice.
The study also hints at just how close a bond humans have with their dogs. In fact, this has been the subject of many recent studies. Last year, researchers working the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that dogs can significantly lower stress and anxiety levels in children, and another study found that dogs are capable of acts of kindness to those they are familiar with.
As research continues, we'll hopefully understand more and more about how our furry friends navigate the world at our side.
Flom’s research was published in Animal Cognition.