SCIENTISTS DISCOVER THAT DOGS ARE ACTUALLY EMPATHIC GENIUSES

MARCH 7, 2016 

Dogs are just as emotional as their human friends. If you don’t believe me then you’ve probably never been in a room with a dog for more than three minutes.

Hopefully this post will encourage you to spend more time with your four legged friends. Same as humans, dogs feel a wide range of emotions and are apt at empathizing with us. That’s why dogs make such great additions to rescue teams and therapeutic practices.

I always thought this skill came from the dog’s inability to form words. Tests have shown certain breeds to be remarkably intelligent.

With all the intelligence and responsive natures nestled inside their doggy heads they communicate with us by ‘understanding’ where we are at and connecting with us. It seems that there is more to it than that.

A study out of the Sao Paulo Universities was carried out to determine dogs’ abstract reasoning skills, empathetic acknowledgement and connection. A team of animal behavioral experts and psychologists showed seventeen dogs abstract representations of positive and negative emotional states.

Visual stimulus was either a person or a dog being various states of happy, upset, in pain, or aggressive.

When each photo was shown to the test participant a sound clip was played in conjunction. The sound bytes were a dog’s aggressive or happy barking or a person saying ‘come here’ in Portuguese with an angry or happy tone.

‘Previous studies have indicated that dogs can differentiate between human emotions from cues such as facial expressions, but this is not the same as emotional recognition.

Our study shows that dogs have the ability to integrate two different sources of sensory information into a coherent perception of emotion in both humans and dogs. 

To do so requires a system of internal categorization of emotional states. This cognitive ability has until now only been evidenced in primates and the capacity to do this across species only seen in humans’ remarked one researcher from the University of Lincoln.

Per session the dog was shown one model expressing different emotions over two screens. Sound bites were played at 2.5 second intervals, and many of the sounds didn’t connect to the currently displayed model. Each participant went though 20 stimuli sessions.

The dogs responded nearly perfectly. The dogs clearly recognized the matching verbal stimuli to the correct image. The dogs confirmed this by staring at the correct image as the corresponding sound was played. The dogs many seemed confused up until the matching stimuli were paired.

‘It has been a long-standing debate whether dogs can recognize human emotions. Many dog owners report anecdotally that their pets seem highly sensitive to the moods of human family members. However, there is an important difference between associative behavior, such as learning to respond appropriately to an angry voice, and recognizing a range of very different cues that go together to indicate emotional arousal in another.

Our findings are the first to show that dogs truly recognize emotions in humans and other dogs. Importantly, the dogs in our trials received no prior training or period of familiarization with the subjects in the images or audio.

This suggests that dogs’ ability to combine emotional cues may be intrinsic. As a highly social species, such a tool would have been advantageous and the detection of emotion in humans may even have been selected for over generations of domestication by us.’  -Professor Daniel Mills, of the University of Lincoln

All of this has been common knowledge up to this point, but now we can start to break down just how dogs do what they do. It is important to remember that this mental and emotional diversity is unique to each breed and each individual dog.

Just as some humans are more in touch with their emotions than their peers, dogs too can specialize in their persona’s. None of the dogs in the study were given any kind of reinforcement or training. They did what they did on instinct.