Your dog seems to sense the tension during an argument, or acts differently in agility competitions when he feels how excited or stressed you are.
He also empathizes with your joy and sees through your words when you try to swindle it. Sometimes you think he understands your emotions even better than your human partner. Sounds familiar?
A research published in Biology Letters reveals that dogs really know how to recognize human emotions and how they react to them based on their own evaluations. It’s not only that they have learned to answer to exterior expression or tone of voice, but it is based on more complicated observation and interpretation.
The research group consisted of British Lincoln University and Brazilian San Paolo University researchers and it was published as a part of The Royal Society Publishing series.
Dog associates various senses in its interpretation
The research studied dogs’ ability to interpret strangers’ emotions in unknown situations. Seventeen domestic dogs looked at pictures of people and dogs, and listened to related audio. The researchers found out that the dogs were much more interested in situations where facial expressions and emotional sounds told the same story: The happy situation joined with playful sounds or aggressive expression with angry voices.
So dogs recognize the state of mind of other dogs and humans. They make interpretations based on facial expressions, gestures and tones of voices. Such ability has not been scientifically proved before, although dog owners are familiar with the topic. According to the research team member Kun Guo it is now clear that dogs can discriminate human emotions, and it’s based on a deeper recognition than just obvious interpretation of facial expressions. Dogs are able to combine the visual and auditory cues from humans. This ability has previously been discovered only among people and a few other primates.
OneMind Dogs -method is based on body language
Some time ago we blogged about how a dog senses the bluff if your feelings are not genuinely involved when you are rewarding him. In agility both your tone of voice and your gestures affect the dog. If they are in conflict the dog gets confused. You can often see this confusion for example in competitions, when the dog senses that the handler is tense. Dog reacts to the handler’s emotions and starts to behave differently than when training. Familiar things are no longer running smoothly.
The research confirms that dogs can not be easily cheated. So communicate consistently with your dog and only train with him when you are truly in a good mood!
