/ emotions

Why Dogs Really Feel Your Pain

Published September 4, 2012 in Dr Peto Says, What's New |
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Dogs may empathize with humans more than any other animal, including humans themselves, several new studies suggest.

The latest research, published in the journal Animal Cognition, found that pet dogs may truly be man (or woman’s) best friend if a person is in distress. That distressed individual does not even have to be someone the dog knows.

“I think there is good reason to suspect dogs would be more sensitive to human emotion than other species,” co-author Deborah Custance told Discovery News. “We have domesticated dogs over a long period of time. We have selectively bred them to act as our companions.”

“Thus,” she added,” those dogs that responded sensitively to our emotional cues may have been the individuals that we would be more likely to keep as pets and breed from.”

Custance and colleague Jennifer Mayer, both from the Department of Psychology at the University of London Goldsmiths College, exposed 18 pet dogs — representing different ages and breeds — to four separate 20-second human encounters. The human participants included the dogs’ fur parents as well as strangers.

During one experimental condition, the people hummed in a weird way. For that one, the scientists were trying to see if unusual behaviour itself could trigger canine concern. The people also talked and pretended to cry.

The majority of the dogs comforted the person, parent or not, when that individual was pretending to cry. The dogs acted submissive as they nuzzled and licked the person, the canine version of “there, there.” Custance and Mayer say this behaviour is consistent with empathic concern and the offering of comfort.

As for what could be going on in the dog’s head, yet another recent study, published in PLoS ONE, showed how the brains of dogs react as the canines view humans. In this case, the researchers trained dogs to respond to hand signals that meant the pups would receive a hot dog treat. Another signal meant no such treat was coming.

The caudate region of the dogs’ brains, an area associated with rewards in humans, showed activation when the canines knew a tasty food treat was coming.

“These results indicate that dogs pay very close attention to human signals,” lead researcher Gregory Berns, director of the Emory Center for Neuropolicy, explained. “And these signals may have a direct line to the dog’s reward system.”

In that study, the reward was food, but Custance and Mayer think canines over the thousands of years of domestication have been rewarded so much for approaching distressed human companions that this may somehow be hardwired into today’s dogs.

The phenomenon in some cases could even have a subconscious element. Consider what happens when a person yawns and a dog is in the room.

“Dogs show contagious yawning to human yawns,” Matthew Campbell, an assistant professor in Georgia State University’s Department of Psychology, told Discovery News.

He said that “we have selected dogs to be in tune with us emotionally.”

Custance and Mayer next hope to determine how empathetic wolves may be.

“It would be interesting to see how wolves who have been raised in human households would respond if they took part in our experiment,” Custance said. “Would they behave like domestic dogs or show less response to a crying human? It would be fascinating to find out.”

Adapted from Discovery Channel

Can Dogs Be Pessimists?

Published September 12, 2011 in Love For Earthlings |
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Since the idea that animals are just little biological machines, living unemotional lives run by instinct and base condition alone, has never really sat well with many — we always sensed there was more going on inside their heads than this.

Researchers from the University of Bristol have shown via experiment that dogs can be essentially optimistic or pessimistic by nature. As The Economic Times glibly describes it, there are dogs that see the glass (uh, bowl) half empty and those which see it half full.

The experiment to demonstrate this consisted of training dogs at two UK rehousing centres that when a bowl was placed in one location in the room it contained food and when placed in another location it would be empty. After which, the food bowl was placed in various locations in between the two.

The researchers found that some dogs, classed as “optimistic,” ran quickly to the middle locations, expecting food to be there, expecting a reward. Other dogs were, shall we say, less enthusiastic.

Extrapolating, those that were optimistic in nature were less likely to be anxious when left alone than dogs with a more pessimistic nature. The researchers say that about half the dogs in the UK at some point exhibit “separation-related behaviours — toileting, barking and destroying objects around the home — when they are apart from their parents. Our study suggests that dogs showing these types of behaviour also appear to make more pessimistic judgment generally.”

Perhaps it is being too generous to ascribe optimism and pessimism to these behaviours. After all, we cannot fully know what is going on with these dogs minds, any more than we can directly know the same for humans. But it is fascinating to me nevertheless to learn that, as with people, there well may be underlying emotional states — not just conditioning — influencing the behaviour of dogs.

After all, this is what most dog parents (and pet owners more broadly) intuitively know anyway. But now you can point to a study demonstrating this.

Adapted from an article on Planet Green