GabyThink you understand your dog? Researchers at Arizona State University have evidence you probably don’t. A new study on how humans perceive dog behavior found that people regularly misinterpret canine emotions, despite the long history of companionship between humans and dogs. “People think they can easily interpret a dog’s feelings. Our research showed that this is not the case. In fact, people often don’t even look at the dog when assessing its emotions,” Holly Molinaro, an animal welfare expert, told BBC Science Focus.
Molinaro and psychology professor Clive Wynne, a co-author of the study, found that people trying to read a dog’s emotions focus too much on external cues—like the sound of a leash—and ignore the dog’s behavior, such as barking or tail wagging. “Our dogs are trying to communicate with us, but we’re inclined to look at everything around them except the poor pup,” Professor Wynne said.
So how did the study work? Researchers recorded dogs’ reactions to a range of positive and negative situations, like being offered a leash before a walk or being gently scolded for a minor misdeed. Using those videos, the scientists ran two experiments. First, they showed footage to 383 people, sometimes with the visual context intact and sometimes with that context removed. Then they edited clips so the dog’s behavior didn’t match the situation—placing a positive reaction into a negative context and vice versa. Those edited videos were shown to 485 volunteers, who rated how happy or sad, excited or calm they thought the dog was.
“When people saw a video of a dog in the context of a leash, they often called the animal excited or anxious. But when participants saw the exact same behavior in a different context, they described the dog as happy and calm. This means people were judging the dog’s emotions not based on its behavior, but on the situation it was in,” Molinaro explained. Yet when volunteers were asked what they considered most important for interpreting a dog’s emotions, they rarely picked the situation’s context—even though the experiment showed context had the strongest influence on their judgments.
The researchers also found that people projected their own feelings onto the dog. Participants who felt happier before the survey were more likely to say the dog was happy, which made it harder for them to assess the animal’s behavior accurately.
So how can you get better at reading your dog? Molinaro recommends being “more humble” about interpreting canine feelings and recognizing that you might not be as accurate as you think. When we read other people’s emotions, we take into account culture, mood, situation, and individual traits. Study your dog’s individual behavior and personality to learn its specific signals. “Every dog is unique; it has its own emotional signals that differ slightly,” Molinaro said. She hopes this research will encourage people to pay attention to their dogs’ cues and the subtle nuances of behavior instead of relying on stereotypes about canine emotions.
