Dogs seem to catch even small shifts in our mannerisms
New research suggests that pooches may be as in tune with our emotions as owners hope.
22 March 2024
By Emma Young
Every dog owner knows that dogs can read what you're feeling. Arrive home in a joyful mood and you're likely to get an even happier dog welcoming you back. Come home feeling angry, and the response could be very different. But new work in the Journal of Comparative Psychology shows that dogs are sensitive to even subtle changes in our demeanour.
These kinds of non-verbal understandings have always fascinated psychologists. 'Still Face' studies, which were first done with mothers and their babies, are just one example of research probing them. In these studies, the mother interacts normally with her baby, but then suddenly switches to holding a still, neutral facial expression, while maintaining eye contact.
Many of us would find this a bit disconcerting, and perhaps unsurprisingly, these studies consistently demonstrated that babies also aren't big fans of it. They react by trying to re-engage their mother in various ways, such as by making 'pick-me-up' gestures. If the mother maintains that expression, even despite their efforts, the baby looks away more and becomes more distressed.
Perhaps reinforcing the fact that many see pets as their children, Molly Byrne and colleagues at Boston College tried a similar experiment with dogs and their owners. After an initial small-scale experiment suggested that dogs might indeed respond to this neutral staring somewhat like babies, they ran a more thorough follow-up on 60 dogs.
In said follow-up, the owners all spent a minute interacting with their dogs in a typically positive way, then, for another minute, they held a neutral expression, while keeping eye contact. Half of the owners kept their hands behind their back for the entire two minutes, while the other half were asked to pet their dogs calmly throughout.
The team writes that, in contrast to what's been seen with babies, the dogs appeared to be more distressed during the normal interaction than the Still Face period. (That said, the results could also be interpreted as suggesting that the dogs were more excited during the minute of normal interaction.)
Like babies, though, they looked away more during the period of Still Face. This was the case for the group that was petted throughout as well as the dogs that weren't.
While it's tempting to say 'aww' and walk away with the impression that dogs react to our small, perhaps a bit strange shifts in mood just like babies, it's somewhat tricky draw that line. In the studies on babies, looking away was taken to represent discomfort with the strange situation. It's very possible that for the dogs, the same was true.
But, it could also be the case that they just decided that their owner wasn't really into interacting any more, and followed suit. Without dogs being able to tell us what's going through their heads, we may never know for sure, as mapping human emotions onto non-human animals comes with its own issues.
In some ways, of course, it's not surprising that the results for pet dogs don't completely mirror those for babies. Aside from being a different species, the dogs were also adults. Unlike human babies, who are famously — and, given their vulnerability and needs, reasonably — demanding, adult dogs may have learned that there are times when their owners are not very attentive, but that this isn't something to worry about.
Even so, the findings do suggest that pet dogs react to relatively subtle facial signals. In line with what many owners likely suspect, they seem able to read not just strong emotions, but also more subtle signals of when we do — and don't — want to interact.
