Abigayle Konys Moreno

I’ll be the first to admit that I talk to my dog. Growing up together, we watched cartoons for an hour after school while sharing a fruit or yogurt cup. We would hang out the driveway on warm spring days, listening to the cars go by with a shared sense of contentment. I get excited to see her when I get to return home now, and her excitement seems to match with a wagging tail (and whole rump I should say) and little doggy snorting noises. She’s my best friend, and I’m okay with people thinking that’s a little bit strange. Whenever I have an off day, it’s as if she can feel it. She insists on licking up my tears on bad days and staying snuggled by my side on sick days. She’s always been at my feet while I’m stress-writing papers and cramming for exams. If you don’t have a dog, you might not understand this; if you do, you know exactly what I mean: Dogs understand us. Or do they?

The first important question to ask is whether your beloved golden retriever actually knows you from the mailman who also gives him treats. Good news! A 2007 study by Adachi and colleagues makes the claim that they do.[1] This study used a violation of expectations procedure[2] to test whether a dog can match your visual and auditory cues. The results show that dogs are consistently confused (read: looked longer) at a picture of a novel human face versus their owner’s when hearing an audio recording of their owner’s voice. Therefore, dogs know us based on multimodal cues unique to us. And the best part of this: when your dog seems extra excited when you come home versus another person, they are actually extra excited to see you, specifically.

So we know that dogs crosscheck their perceptual modalities to identify us, but once they do, are they really able to understand how excited we are to see them? It turns out there is some validity to the claim that our dogs pick up on our emotions. According to a 2009 looking time paradigm[3] by Morisaki and colleagues, dogs tend to look longer at pictures of their owners expressing happy emotions as opposed to sad emotions.[4] While this doesn’t fully indicate that dogs full recognize human emotions, it does provide evidence that they are sensitive to some emotions over others. So your dog knows when you’re happy or sad, and specifically prefers to look at you less when you are sad.  This may, however, be related to instances wherein they are in trouble and could benefit from averting gaze, and less to do with interacting with your own emotions.[5]

There is a caveat here, and it may have to do more with your dog’s lineage than your special relationship with them.  Passalacqua and colleagues tested different breeds on a solvable food container puzzle before giving them an unsolvable version.[6] While the differences among breeds were not significant among puppies younger than two months, those older than four and half months and adult dogs showed more human-directed gazing behavior in the Hunting-Herding groups than any others. These breeds may have a greater tendency toward problem solving with their owners because of their long history of working alongside them. This, however, is nothing to worry about. While your dog may not so much be attentive to your teamwork if they are one of these breeds, they nonetheless vie for your companionship.

To explore this idea further, Kis and colleagues investigated at how oxytocin might affect this looking time paradigm using a new technology for dog sociocognition research: eye tracking.[7] In their study, dogs’ eyes were tracked while looking at both happy and angry humans faces, and they did so with or without intranasal oxytocin spray.[8],[9] From there, they found that dogs looked less at angry faces than happy faces in the placebo condition, but gazed a similar amount at each in the oxytocin condition. This could mean that when dogs see happy faces, it makes them happy, or at least less aversive to the happy-faced human. Because dogs seem to react this way, they might be more likely to hang out with us when they perceive we are being positive. Still, this doesn’t necessarily prove that our dogs like to hang out with us. And then why do they seem to stick by us when we’re not having our best days?  For that, we have to look at some other measures as well.

Recent work by Sumegi and colleagues suggest that humans’ emotions may affect their dogs’ emotions through emotional contagion.[10] In their study, dog owners were either stressed or not stressed through positive or negative feedback on a set of reading comprehension questions. The dogs and their owners were taken through a series of obedience tasks, followed by positive or negative reinforcement from the experimenter. The owners were then instructed to either give positive or negative feedback to their dogs, therefore making them stressed or less stressed.  The dogs then performed a memory task of retrieving a ball that had been hidden prior to these other tasks. Through all of these manipulations, they found that dogs whose owners had been stressed performed worse on the memory tasks than dogs whose owners had not been stressed. This emotional contagion suggests that your stressful energy may be affecting your dog’s cognitive capacities just as it is affecting your own. Basically, if you’re having a bad day, your dog is going to know, and might just have a bad day too because of it.

From all of this, it seems likely that our dogs can recognize us, pick up on our emotions, and even are affected themselves. Which makes sense: dogs stick by us, love us, and want to be loved by us. Any sort of negative emotion seems to just begetting in the way of this. The idea of social contagion reflects a cross-species empathy, potentially due to their long history of domestication and companionship.  If this is the case, humans and dogs might have similar reactions to emotive stimuli. To test this hypothesis, Yong & Ruffman conducted a study with a common, extremely salient aversive stimulus: crying babies.[11] In the experiment, dogs and humans were subjected to the noise of a human infant crying, human infant babbling, and computer-generated white noise. Their results showed that both dogs and humans showed an increase in cortisol levels as well as increased alertness[12] only after hearing the infant crying. Additionally, the dogs showed a submissive reaction of lowered tails and heads, further suggesting that the distress of their human companions makes them react by being on edge. From all of these studies, it seems that the things we hate, our dogs hate as well, by association. When it comes specifically to the distress of humans, they seem to have a visceral reaction similar to our own. Our dogs understand our emotions to the extent that they can feel them themselves, meaning they are in tune to our emotional affect. This is good news for when you’re going through a breakup and just want to snuggle with your dog while binge-watching Friends. Chances are, your dog isn’t feeling so great either, and will be happy to be your companion.

What isn’t clear, however, is to what extent our canine companions understand why we are upset. For this, we can look to theory of mind (read: the understanding of other minds as being different from our own). A 2011 study by Kaminski and colleagues investigated this idea by testing whether dogs indicated the locations of items that they desired versus items that their owners desire.[13] Significantly, dogs indicated to their owner the location of the item that they wanted over the item that would be more useful to their owners. These findings show that while dogs may be very good at understanding the emotional affect of our conversations, their rational thinking is still confined to their doggy agendas. While your dog might be staying by you during your sick day, they aren’t going to be able to tell that you’ll need orange juice over their favorite squeaky toy.

It seems that dogs are really good at perceiving our emotions and even find them contagious. To even further test the idea of social contagions, O’Hara & Reeve tested whether this emotional contagion translated to interspecies yawning.[14] If we can pass our yawns off to our dogs, it could be further evidence that they are influenced by our emotions.  This experiment was fairly simple and asked owners to yawn while sitting on the floor in front of their dog for three minutes on two separate occasions. While they did not find significant results for this emotional contagion, this experiment was a replication study by Joly-Mascheroni and colleagues that did show effects of dogs’ contagious yawning 12-32% more that humans.[15] There could be some effects here of close companionship between dogs and owners versus shelter dogs that are just interacting with the experimenters for the first time. The results could also just be random and therefore inconclusive at this time. In each study, some of the dogs nonetheless yawned during the experimental trials, so this emotional contagion is still up for debate. Or a fun activity for you and your dog to try together.

My dog is kind of a weirdo. I’m allowed to say this because I’m her owner, and she’s my best friend. I know when she’s having a bad day (read: my dad is on vacation or she has an ear infection), because she sulks around the house, but still wants to be near me. Sometimes, she is just having a good dog day and is as happy as a clam for no reason in particular. As much as our dogs seem to be affected by our emotions, I’m affected by my dog’s emotions too. That’s just what we do. While she can’t understand why I’m feeling the way I am, I can appreciate that there is some understanding behind her emotional acuity—even if she just continues to stare at me warmly with two lazy eyes.

[1] Adachi, I., Kuwahata, H., & Fujita, K. (2007). Dogs recall their owner’s face upon hearing the owner’s voice. Animal Cognition, 10, 17–21.doi:10.1007/s10071-006-0025-8

[2] If your dog looks longer at a specific stimulus, it means they think of it as something new, different, or incorrect.  Mixing your voice with your mailman’s picture should do just that, if your dog can differentiate between the two of you.

[3] This method uses looking time differently, here as an indication of preference based on where your dog looks longest. Think of it in terms of them deciding between to treats: for most dogs, they’re going to look longer at a peanut butter bone than broccoli.

[4] Morisaki, Ayako, Akiko Takaoka, and Kazuo Fujita. "Are Dogs Sensitive to the Emotional State of Humans?" Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research 4, no. 2 (2009): 49.doi:10.1016/j.jveb.2008.09.020.

[5] We’ve all been here at some point with our dog: they pee on the rug, chew your new shoe, or eat the entire plate of sugar cookies on the counter. And man, do they look guilty now.

[6] Passalacqua, Chiara, Sarah Marshall-Pescini, Shanis Barnard, Gabriella Lakatos, Paola Valsecchi, and Emanuela Prato Previde. 2011.“Human-Directed Gazing Behaviour in Puppies and Adult Dogs, Canis Lupus Familiaris.” Animal Behaviour 82 (5): 1043–50. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.07.039.

[7] Kis, Anna, Alin Ciobica, and József Topál. 2017. “The Effect of Oxytocin on Human-Directed Social Behaviour in Dogs ( Canis Familiaris ).”Hormones and Behavior 94: 40–52. doi:10.1016/j.yhbeh.2017.06.001. (7-8). This sounds scary and potentially harmful, but fear not. Eye tracking is just a measure of light reflecting off of the cornea in different directions to track where the participant is looking.

[8] Again, this is proven to be safe and also a common practice for human research.

[9] My dog loves to make eye contact—extended, awkward, seemingly zoned-out eye contact. This may have todo partially with her offset bug eyes, but maybe she’s just gathering extra data and is taking a while to process it.

[10] Sümegi, Zsófia, Katalin Oláh, and József Topál. 2014. “Emotional Contagion in Dogs as Measured by Change in Cognitive Task Performance.” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 160: 106–15. doi:10.1016/j.applanim.2014.09.001. Sumegi (2014) Emotional contagion simply means that the emotions of one subject are taken on by the other.

[11] Yong, Min Hooi, and Ted Ruffman. 2014. “Emotional Contagion: Dogs and Humans Show a Similar Physiological Response to Human Infant Crying.”Behavioural Processes 108: 155–65. doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2014.10.006.

[12] For the dogs, this was signaled by picked ears, stiffened legs, and staring.

[13] Kaminski, Juliane, Martina Neumann, Juliane Bräuer, Josep Call,and Michael Tomasello. 2011. “Dogs, Canis Familiaris, Communicate with Humans to Request but Not to Inform.” Animal Behaviour 82 (4): 651–58.doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.06.015.

[14] O’Hara, Sean J., and Amy V. Reeve. 2011. “A Test of the Yawning Contagion and Emotional Connectedness Hypothesis in Dogs, Canis Familiaris.” Animal Behaviour 81 (1): 335–40. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2010.11.005.

[15] Joly-Mascheroni, R. M, A. Senju, and A. J Shepherd. 2008. “Dogs Catch Human Yawns.” Biology Letters 4 (5): 446–48. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2008.0333.