The research reveals owners may be barking up the wrong tree when it comes to understanding their pooches
The relationship between dog and owner involves a lot of give and take, especially when it comes to communication. Humans and pets don’t speak the same language so we rely on understanding and body language when reading our pet, and vice versa.
That process can seem easy. You give your dog a treat and they react by wagging their tail and eating it. This connects you and your dog. At least, that’s what you think.
New research from Arizona State University has revealed that people often do not perceive the true meaning of their pet’s emotions and can misread their dog.
In a new paper, ‘Human perceptions of dog emotions is influenced by extraneous factors’, researchers Holly Molinaro and Clive Wynne outline experiments they ran to show how humans misunderstand dog emotions.
Their research shows that humans typically do not have a good understanding of the emotional state of their dog. This is because they judge the dog’s emotions based on the situation rather than the dog’s behaviour.
“People do not look at what the dog is doing, instead they look at the situation surrounding the dog and base their emotional perception on that,” said Molinaro, a psychology student and animal welfare scientist.
“Our dogs are trying to communicate with us, but we humans seem determined to look at everything except the poor pooch himself,” Wynne, a psychology professor who studies dog behaviour and the human-dog bond, added.
So where does this misunderstanding come from? Researchers say it comes from humans projecting their feelings onto the dog. This stops owners from truly understanding what your dog’s emotional state actually is, and what they are trying to tell you.
In two experiments, Molinaro and Wynne investigated human perception of dog emotions. They video recorded a dog in positive (happy-making) or negative (less happy) situations.
The happy situations were things like offering the leash or a treat, and the unhappy scenarios included gently telling them off or bringing out the dreaded hoover, which can wind a lot of dogs up.
In one experiment, they showed members of the public these videos with and without context. In the second experiment they edited the videos so the dog who had been filmed in a happy context looked like he had been recorded in an unhappy situation, and vice versa.
People rated how happy and excited they thought the dogs were. The researchers found that people’s perception of the dog’s mood was based on everything in the videos besides the dog himself.
On the misrepresentation, Molinaro said: “You see a dog getting a treat, you assume he must be feeling good. You see a dog getting shouted at, you assume he’s feeling bad.
“These assumptions of how you think the dog is feeling have nothing to do with the dog’s behaviour or emotional cues, which is very striking.”
“When people saw a video of a dog apparently reacting to a vacuum cleaner, everyone said the dog was feeling bad and agitated,” Wynne continued. “But when they saw a video of the dog doing the exact same thing, but this time appearing to react to seeing his leash, everyone reported that the dog was feeling happy and calm.”
In terms of owners projecting their emotions onto a dog, Molinaro explained that while humans and dogs have bonded over the centuries, that doesn’t mean the way they process or express emotions are the same.
There is more to reading emotion than just looking at a person’s face, Molinaro explained. Culture, mood, situational context, even a previous facial expression can influence how people perceive emotions.
But when it comes to animal emotions, no one has yet studied if those same factors affect us in the same way. So, how does a good dog owner come to understand their pets true emotional state?
“Every dog’s personality, and thus her emotional expressions, are unique to that dog,” Molinaro explained. “Really pay attention to your own dog’s cues and behaviours.”
“When you shout at your dog for doing something bad and she makes that guilty face, is it really because she is guilty, or is it because she is scared you are going to reprimand her more?
“Taking an extra second or two to focus on your dog’s behaviours, knowing that you need to overcome a bias to view the situation around the dog rather than the dog himself, can go a long way in getting a true read on your own dog’s emotional state, leading to a stronger bond between the two of you.”
