Dogs Read Human Emotions and Perform Better for Happy Owners

A new study examines differences in dogs’ behavior while their owners’ experience various emotional states. Researchers found that dogs behaved differently depending on their owner’s emotion, performing better at a training task with a happy owner.

Any dog lover will tell you that their pet knows exactly what they’re feeling. An abundance of anecdotal evidence, plus recent studies using simulated or recorded emotional expressions, indicate that this is the case, but a new study published in Animal Cognition closes an important gap by testing how dogs respond in real time to genuine human emotions.

The results show that dogs indeed perceive differences in human emotion and behave differently depending on their owner’s emotional state. Dogs gazed and jumped less often and, surprisingly, were less compliant with the ‘sit’ command when learning a new task from a sad owner. By contrast, dogs with happy owners performed better at the new task than dogs with sad or neutral owners.

To reach these results, researchers with the DogStudies research group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology tested 77 dog-owner pairs in a two-session experiment. The owners did not know the purpose of the study. In the first session, owners were given detailed instructions designed to induce a neutral emotion. They then trained their dog in an obstacle-course-like task, in which the dog would start sitting close to their owner, walk around a cone, and then return to their owner. If the dog was successful three times, the owner would move farther away from the cone and repeat from the new position.

In the second session, owners were randomly shown a video clip selected to induce either sadness, happiness, or neutrality. They then immediately resumed training their dog on the task from session one. Researchers then compared the frequency of several dog behaviors in the two settings to measure if and to what extent the owner’s emotional state had an influence.

While analysis of the dogs’ behavior shows that they behave differently based on their owner’s emotions, researchers say it is unlikely that dogs are empathizing with us. In fact, dogs seem to keep their distance when owners are sad and don’t appear to exhibit more helpful or comforting behaviors.

“Dogs may not be empathetic, but their ability to perceive and distinguish human emotions is still highly valuable. Further research holds the potential to provide deeper insights into this dynamic with regard to many areas of the human-dog relationship, e.g. the training of assistance dogs,” says Dr Juliane Bräuer, leader of the DogStudies group.

“By better understanding how dogs respond to human emotions, researchers hope that humankind’s relationship with our best friend will only improve, leading to improved training regimes, fewer confrontations, and new areas of cooperation,” adds Yana Bender, doctoral researcher with the DogStudies group.