Latest news with #CanineScienceCollaboratory
Forbes
09-06-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Study Finds People Aren't Good At Reading Dog Body Language
Humans don't understand dogs' body language and corresponding emotions as well as we think we do, according to new research from the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University. The study involved a favorite activity of many dog lovers: watching dog videos. As part of her Ph.D. research, Holly Molinaro shot videos of her father interacting with the family dog, Oliver. Sometimes he would offer Oliver a treat or show him a leash for a walk, which made the dog happy. In other videos, he might reprimand Oliver or hold up his nemesis, a cat named Saffron. Working with Clive Wynne, Ph.D., director of the Canine Science Collaboratory and author of 'Dog is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You,' Molinaro then showed three versions of the videos to 400 study participants — which led to surprising results. When the videos were unedited, a majority of people could correctly identify whether Oliver was happy or stressed. But when the videos were edited to simply show Oliver with a black background, they couldn't form an opinion about the dog's emotions. When the videos were edited to show Oliver reacting to a different prompt than what actually happened — like the father showing Oliver a cat in the video, when in reality he had been offering the dog a piece of cheese — participants had strong and wrong opinions about how Oliver was feeling. 'The whole study was very surprising,' Dr. Wynne said. 'The finding, in a nutshell, is that when you show people a video of a dog reacting to something and you ask them how the dog is feeling, they will look at everything you show them except the dog when making their mind up. So people are really bad at paying attention to dogs when it comes to assessing how a dog is feeling — whether a dog is happy or sad.' One important caveat is that due to ethical considerations, the research did not involve doing anything to make Oliver extremely distressed, Dr. Wynne notes. Instead, the research was limited to potentially negative things a dog might encounter in an ordinary day, such as a cat or nail clippers. 'I'm pretty confident that people would have accurately identified a terrified dog,' he says. 'We just wouldn't do that.' Since dogs live in 68 million U.S. homes, Dr. Wynne feels it's imperative that people make a concerted effort to better read their emotions. 'One of the morals I draw from our research is that I encourage people to get to know their own dog,' he says. 'Now I'm on a mission to convince people that they don't really know what a dog is feeling and that they should give their dog a chance to teach them.' He suggests paying close attention to what your dog does when they're typically excited or happy about an activity, such as seeing a leash when it's time for a walk. 'We need to watch our whole dog from the tip of their tail to the tip of the snout and everything in between. The ears can be expressive. Obviously the hackles, how the hair moves, the overall bodily posture,' he says. 'As much as possible, just try to be like a scientist: don't watch by imposing your preconceptions, watch neutrally and learn. Let the dog teach you what their happiness looks like, what their anxiety looks like.' Puppies and dogs are individuals, so Dr. Wynne advises against making one-size-fits-all assumptions about canine body language, facial expressions and noises. For example, growling is generally considered to be a threatening warning from a less-than-happy dog. But his late mixed-breed dog, Xephos, used to growl in happiness. (Similarly, attuned people with Rottweilers often know their dogs are happy when they hear the 'Rottie Rumble' during play — almost like a cat's purr.) When a dog yawns, they might be sleepy or just awakening from a nap, but yawning can also be a sign of stress (particularly when ears are pinned back, and eyes are averted). A 'smiling' dog might just be keeping their mouth open because it's hot. While some people believe a wagging tail is always a happy sign, it can also indicate anxiety. Research in Italy found that when dogs wag their tails to the right, they're experiencing positive emotions; conversely, a left-wagging tail denotes negative emotions, he notes. Ultimately, learning to understand how our dogs are feeling will help us be better companions, according to Dr. Wynne. 'We have 80 million dogs living in our homes in the United States, and the vast majority of us want what's best for our dogs – we love them and want what's best for them,' he says. 'But how can we do that if we don't actually know when they're happy and when they're stressed? We have to know how they're feeling in order to be able to give them their best lives.'
Washington Post
26-05-2025
- Science
- Washington Post
Humans believe they understand their dogs. Our research gave us pause.
Oliver, one of the researcher's dogs, is seen on a black background, as part of an experiment. (Holly Molinaro) Dog owners don't understand their pet's emotions as well as they think they do. Clive D.L. Wynne is a professor of psychology and director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University. Holly Molinaro has recently completed her PhD at Arizona State. Most of us have powerful intuitions about how our dog is feeling — starting with that flag attached to the rear end, the tail. Tail wagging: dog happy. Tail tucked: dog sad or scared. And yet the scientific literature is surprisingly quiet about whether we are actually good at reading a dog's emotions. If people are going to care for dogs, they need to know how their pet is really feeling — so we studied just how well they understand dogs' emotions. Our work started during the pandemic with one of us, Clive, in Arizona and the other, Holly, in Connecticut. As we struggled to master Zoom, we realized that manipulating video could help us investigate this question. First, Holly filmed her dog Oliver playing with her father in several situations. Some positive, like giving him a treat … ... and some negative, like showing his nemesis, Saffron. Holly then edited the videos, so they showed only Oliver against a black backdrop. The videos were shown to hundreds of people who were asked how Oliver was feeling. A key finding was that people couldn't say how Oliver was feeling without any context. Holly filmed her (now much-missed) dog Oliver playing with her father, Rich. Some of the time Rich set up situations that would be considered positive; such as playing with Oliver, showing him his leash or giving him a treat. Rich also created negative situations, such as showing Oliver his nemesis in the house, Saffron the cat. Holly filmed everything, and then, just as Zoom makes it possible to obscure the background, she edited the videos so that viewers only saw Oliver against a black backdrop. We then showed 400 people these videos and asked them how Oliver was feeling. First, we showed just Oliver on the black background, and then we let people see the same videos with the full context: Oliver, Rich and anything Rich had with him — like a treat or Saffron. No surprise, when given full context, an overwhelming majority of people rated Oliver as happy in positive situations and less happy in negative ones. But in videos without contextual information — no Rich, no leash, no Saffron or anything else — they couldn't tell us how Oliver was feeling. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement This was a shock. Surely people could tell a happy dog from an unhappy one? We delved deeper. Since context seemed so important, what if the context was … wrong? Holly and her dad (and Oliver!) went back to work. Holly made movies of Rich and Oliver in different scenarios and manipulated some videos to make it appear that Oliver was playing with Rich when the unedited footage was actually of Oliver being reprimanded. In others, Oliver appeared to be responding to a reprimand, when in reality he had been shown his leash which promised a fun walk. We sent this second survey to 500 people and found that when they saw Rich doing something fun, such as offering Oliver a treat, they responded consistently that Oliver was feeling good, regardless of whether the footage they saw was of Oliver actually reacting to a positive or a negative situation. When people saw Rich doing something a little mean to Oliver, they thought the dog was more sad and anxious, regardless of what Oliver was actually reacting to. Our participants rated how Oliver was feeling based solely on what Rich was doing. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement You might think, 'Okay, well, that's someone else's dog. I surely know my own dog the best.' Holly showed her dad the edited videos as well. When Rich watched, even he was stumped as to what his dog was really feeling. 'Oh, that video was definitely the one where I showed Oliver some cheese. He loves cheese!' 'Actually, no, Dad. That is the one where he is being shown the cat.' 'Well, then — ' So what is going on here? Are we truly just terrible at understanding if our dog is happy or not? Can you guess Oliver's emotion? Happy Sad The owner is playing with Oliver, asking him to roll over. Happy Sad Oliver is being reprimanded, with the owner pointing a finger at him. Happy Sad Oliver is facing an enemy – a cat named Saffron. A pair of studies in Italy a decade ago helps fill out this picture. A team at the Universities of Bari and Trieste put dogs one by one in a wooden box with cameras above them and a window in front. The cameras were trained on the dogs' wagging tails while the researchers presented things to look at through the window. The researchers showed the dogs their owner, an unfamiliar person and an unfamiliar dog. The dogs showed a strong, consistent bias to wag their tails to the right when shown their owner or an unfamiliar human but a left bias toward the unfamiliar dog, indicating that dogs' wagging tails show their emotional state not simply by how much they wag them but also the side of the body they wag their tails toward. This likely is connected to how the left side of the brain is more specialized for approach and the right side for withdrawal. In the dog these signals cross over on their way from brain to tail, leading to more rightward wagging for something the dog would like to approach and more leftward wagging for something it would rather retreat from. This is a striking finding, because in all the millennia people have been watching dogs and writing about them, nobody had ever noticed that the direction a tail wags makes any difference. While humans may be blind to this aspect of emotional expression in dogs, our canine friends certainly notice. In a follow-up study, the researchers connected dogs to heart rate monitors and showed them videos of other dogs wagging their tails. If the dogs saw a left-wagging tail, their heart rate revealed they were more anxious than when they watched a right-wagging tail. People and dogs have been living together for more than 15,000 years. In that time, what have we learned? Our study along with the research from Italy, shows that, despite intense intuitions, people are poor at recognizing the emotional state of dogs. Instead, we look at everything around the dog to guess what our pet must be feeling but fail to look closely at the animal itself. This might not seem so surprising. After all, we don't have tails to wag, and we don't sniff our friends' backsides to learn how they're feeling. But it's crucial to the success of our lives together because the world we share with our dogs has changed dramatically over recent decades. Our dogs no longer live in kennels in the backyard, as their great-grandparents did. More than three-quarters of dogs in America today curl up each night in bed with people who consider them family members. Highly trained hounds console patients in hospitals, and there are even churches that involve dogs as part of their ministry. This increased intimacy requires us to accurately gauge our dogs' moods. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Meanwhile, at the other end of the leash, several studies have shown that dogs are remarkably good at recognizing human emotional expressions. They can tell what emotion a human face is showing or respond with empathetic concern to a weeping person. Where our comprehension of dogs' emotions is so weak, their understanding of us is remarkably strong. We need to confront our biases and be more modest in our assessment of canine emotions. We have to recognize that it isn't easy to know how a dog is feeling, but with careful attention to each individual dog we might be able to learn what their happiness looks like. Post Opinions wants to know: How did your relationship with your dog evolve over time? Share your responses and they might be published as letters to the editor.
The Guardian
26-04-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Who's a clever boy: the average dog has a mental age of about two. But what are they really thinking?
The thing that made me think my dog may be a genius was the word monkey. We'd developed a game where I'd hide her monkey toy – a sad, lifeless being, long lobotomised by my golden retriever puppy – and, when I asked her to find it, I realised she could differentiate the word monkey from other objects. A woman in the park had a similar story. On holiday in an unfamiliar cottage, she had misplaced the car keys. After hunting for them for over an hour, her dog, a border collie, overheard her and her husband talking about it, recognised the word 'keys' and immediately went and found them. So maybe my dog, Rhubarb, isn't a genius after all. Dogs, says Vanessa Woods, director of the Puppy Kindergarten project at Duke University in North Carolina, US, and writer of several books including Puppy Kindergarten: The New Science of Raising a Great Dog, can know hundreds of words for objects. 'Over 1,000, probably,' she says. 'And actually it's more interesting than that, because they learn words the way children learn words, and that's not by repetition.' Psychology professor Juliane Kaminski showed back in 2004 that a dog called Rico (another border collie), could learn, as children do, by inference – he didn't need to know the name of a new toy, he could work it out by excluding the toys he did know the names of. We share our homes (sometimes our beds) with them, but how much do we really know about what dogs think and feel? Whether chihuahua or husky, domestic dogs descended from wolves, but their behaviour, says Clive Wynne, psychology professor at Arizona State University and director of its Canine Science Collaboratory research lab, is 'substantially different. You can tame wolves, and they can be really affectionate. But taming wolves is quite challenging, whereas taming dogs is so easy that you hardly ever talk about 'taming' dogs.' There are about 13 million dogs in the UK. In the US, there are about 90 million. 'Whereas there are only a few thousand wolves left [in the US],' says Wynne (in the UK, they're extinct). 'In a world that's totally dominated by human beings, living alongside human beings was a good choice. Dogs evolved capacities to find it easier to live with humans.' Some researchers think dogs have 'evolved special forms of cognition, what you could call special forms of intelligence, to make them better at understanding people,' but Wynne says he's sceptical about this idea. 'I take the view that [the higher capabilities] are almost entirely in the emotional domain.' Dogs seem to be born with the ability to read human emotions, says Woods: 'Like in human babies, reading our thoughts and intentions seems to be one of the first cognitive skills that comes online in puppies.' The ability to read our body language, she says, is something 'that really not even our closest living relative, the great apes, have'. Dogs are social animals, and are very tuned into the humans around them. 'They watch humans and they pick up cues from humans, because by being observant, they get an easy life,' says Daniel Mills, professor of veterinary behavioural medicine at the University of Lincoln. 'The more I study dog cognition, actually the less 'smart' I think dogs are. But they are incredibly observant, really fine-tuned, and so they tend to do very smart things because they're very good at making associations.' If dogs are brilliant at reading humans, we are terrible at reading dogs. A recent study by Wynne and Holly Molinaro, his colleague at Arizona State University, showed that people interpreted a dog's emotions based on external situations, rather than 'reading' the behaviour of the dog itself. Researchers recorded videos of a dog in 'positive' and 'negative' scenarios, for example being offered a treat or being gently told off, and asked particpants to assess the dog's emotions. They then edited the videos to remove the external scenarios, showing just the dog's reaction. People who saw the edited videos assessed the dog's emotions differently to those who saw the dog's reaction in context. They even found that our own emotions affect how we read dogs – people who considered themselves happier before the test were more likely to rate the dog's emotion positively. Charges of anthropomorphism have dogged canine researchers, including Stanley Coren, professor emeritus in the department of psychology at the University of British Columbia, and a dogfather of dog science. The prevailing idea that dogs have similar cognitive and emotional capabilities to a human toddler goes back to research Coren did in the 90s – but this bit of anthropomorphism is quite useful for our poor human brains to relate to. Coren adapted tests used for human infants to research dogs' language-learning abilities. 'We found that the average dog has a mental age of between two and two-and-a-half years [in human terms],' he says, one of his dogs barking in the background. 'The super-dogs, the upper 20% in terms of intelligence, have a mental age of between two-and-a-half and three.' We can extrapolate this, he says, to other mental and emotional capabilities. 'If an average two-and-a-half-year-old is expected to have these abilities, then the first guess would be that a dog would have those abilities.' Young children recognise when the number of objects they've been looking at changes; dogs do too. Coren says dogs can count up to five. Between the ages of one and three, a child will learn to respond to a pointing gesture. 'At about age two, the average child will know there's something interesting there, and will usually look in that direction.' Dogs will do the same. But, he says, 'wolves don't have that response, even if they've been reared with a human family'. One area where dogs beat toddlers is memory. Think of how much you remember from when you were around two (probably nothing). 'However, dogs have a good memory and there are lots of examples,' says Coren. He recalls a colleague's dog that had previously been owned by the colleague's Czech father, who had taught the dog commands in his native language. The colleague inherited the dog when it was about 18 months old, and it lived with him and his English-speaking family. Around seven years later, when a relative from the Czech Republic visited, the dog still responded to commands in Czech. In terms of emotions, Coren says that the average two-and-a-half-year-old human 'will have all of the basic emotions – fear, aggression, love, surprise and disgust, but complex social emotions like guilt don't show up until a child is about four'. Many dog owners will claim that they can instantly recognise their dog's 'guilty face' – and there are numerous pictures and videos online of dogs apparently looking remorseful – but this is anthropomorphism at work again, as a study by Alexandra Horowitz, an expert in canine cognition, has shown. 'Dogs don't feel guilt, and those expressions you see are really fear, because they know that when they see their owner and the evidence of their transgression, then bad things happen,' says Coren. 'What does it take to feel guilty?' asks Wynne. 'You have to know that there are rules in your society, and you need to know that you've broken the rules, and you need to know that you've been found out. That's layer upon layer upon layer, and dogs just don't have all of that. They can tell you're upset with them, but that's as far as it goes.' So, do our dogs really love us, or just view us as a provider of resources? 'I think they do,' says Mills. 'They have an incredible loyalty to humans. But is it the same as the sort of love that the human shows them? No, I don't think so. I think it's probably a purer form.' Wynne says he doesn't use the word 'love' in his scientific research papers, but adds: 'I think that's a perfectly reasonable way to capture the nature of the bond between people and dogs – a nurturing, caring type of love.' Woods, who says '100% they love you', points to a 2015 study by Takefumi Kikusui, a professor of animal behaviour, and others at Azabu University in Japan. It showed that both dogs and their owners experienced a surge of oxytocin – the love and bonding hormone – when they gazed into each other's eyes. Some dogs, like some children, 'are more demonstrative than others,' says Woods. 'If a dog is not particularly tactile, they tend to make a lot of eye contact – they're 'hugging' you with their eyes.' Why do they seem to like or dislike certain people, or other dogs? When Wynne introduced dogs at rehoming shelters to two women who looked similar and dressed alike, 'the dogs very rapidly developed strong preferences for one stranger over another, but we don't know why'. At my puppy training class, two dogs took an instant and mutual dislike to each other. 'Maybe it's learned associations,' says Mills. 'It's not uncommon that, as a puppy, they may have been bowled over by a labrador, so they don't now like big dogs.' It could be our fault – we misread their caution about a new experience as fear and jerked them back on the lead, thinking we were keeping them safe, 'so now they have a learned association between that type of dog or person and punishment'. There is also research, says Mills, around excluding group members who threaten the integrity of the pack. It may be that some dogs 'do not like certain other dogs because they don't want them to be part of their group'. Because they view them as undesirable in some way? 'Yes, or they think that they're a freeloader, or they think their group is very good at the moment and they're closely bonded, and they don't want somebody else potentially joining it.' If my dog does love me as much as I love her, why then does she ignore me so often? Her absolute favourite thing to do is lull me into letting her off the lead in the park, then race off into the distance as soon as she spots another dog/squirrel/muddy puddle, with me running after her, shouting manically while she completely ignores me. Even when I ask her to do something at home, without distractions, she often deliberately ignores me. 'When you say 'deliberately', you've immediately interpreted her behaviour, and we do this effortlessly – that's part of the problem,' says Mills. 'We think we know what's going on in their heads and, actually, she's probably just interested in something else. She's not deliberately ignoring you, because that implies she's thinking about it and choosing an action. She's doing her own thing.' Wondering what your dog is thinking about is probably futile. They can analyse situations, says Mills, but they aren't capable of abstract thought in the way we are. Rather than being able to plan ahead, 'they're capable of goal-directed behaviour, but again, it doesn't require complex thoughts – you just have to have, in your brain, some sort of model'. What makes dogs happy? 'Being with you,' says Woods. 'I think the happiest dog is when they're spending quality time with their owners.' Wynne says he's always on the verge of writing a paper 'called 'What is a good life for a dog?', and I don't suppose for a moment that it's the same for every single dog.' Every dog he's ever known loved going for walks, but his new dog prefers to go for a ride in the car. 'Discover through experience what makes a good life for your dog.' Aside from the obvious things – food, water, shelter, security and veterinary care – Wynne says 'almost all dogs need strong emotional connections to the people they live with'. It's the reason he dislikes the term 'separation anxiety' because 'it makes it sound like the dog is wrong [to miss you]. It is not reasonable to leave dogs alone for six, eight, 14 hours a day.' I write as Rhubarb, my 10-month-old golden retriever, is staring at me. Is she simply telling me she loves me, as Woods suggests, or is it because she thinks it's time to stop work and pay her some attention? I'll take it as the latter.
