When you are upset and your dog approaches to comfort you, do you wonder if they understand how you feel? Many dog owners would “yes,” and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that dogs show physical signs of empathy, which is the ability to share and understand the feeling of another.
Humans are hardwired to trigger an emotional response upon perceiving a similar emotional state in another individual. For example, when you hear an infant crying, we pay attention, and our body releases the stress hormone cortisol.
Our response could be described as emotional contagion, a primitive form of empathy that does not need higher psychological functions. The unconscious state matching between individuals is evolutionarily advantageous for social species.
Can dogs understand humans’ emotions, though? The expanding field of canine cognitive science says “yes!” Here are five scientific studies to cite next time someone asks, “Do you think your dog understands your emotions?”
- Dogs and Humans Show a Similar Physiological Response to Human Infant Crying
When: 2014
Where: University of Otago, New Zealand
Journal: Behavioral Processes
What: Scientists recorded each of the 75 dogs’ and their owners’ cortisol levels in response to three auditory stimuli: a human infant crying, a human infant babbling, and computer-generated “white noise.”
Result: Cortisol levels in both humans and dogs increased after listening to crying, and dogs showed a unique behavioral response to crying, tucking their tails – combining submissiveness with alertness.
Conclusion: These results suggest that dogs experience emotional contagion in response to human infant crying and provide evidence of a primitive form of cross-species empathy.
- Dogs Perform Better on Memory Tasks When Owner is Stressed
Note: With some initial stress, it is proven that humans perform better on memory tasks
When: 2014
Where: Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Journal: Applied Animal Behavioral Science
What: Three experimental groups, stressed guardian, non-stressed guardian, and stressed dog, performed both baseline and experimental memory tasks.
Result: Stressed guardians performed better in the memory task than non-stressed guardians, and dogs improved their performance on memory tasks after they were stressed and after their guardians were stressed. Dogs in the non-stressed guardian group showed no such improvement.
Conclusion: This study shows that guardian anxiety positively affects the dogs’ ability to perform well on a memory-related task indicating emotional contagion.
- Dogs Can Match Emotional Vocalizations with Facial Expressions
When: 2016
Where: University of Lincoln, UK
Journal: Biological Letters
What: Scientists simultaneously showed 17 domestic dogs two distinct sources of sensory input: photos of facial expressions and audio clips of vocalizations from unfamiliar subjects.
Result: Dogs spent significantly longer looking at the facial expressions, which matched the emotional state of the vocalization, for both human and canine subjects.
Conclusion: The integration of different types of sensory information indicates that dogs have mental representation of emotions and a system of internal categorization for emotional states, distinct from associative behaviors, which have to do with conditioning.
