People Are Surprisingly Bad at Reading Their Dogs

After thousands of years living with dogs, humans have learned surprisingly little about how the animals express emotion, according to Arizona State researchers. As professor Clive DL Wynne and his former PhD student Holly Molinaro explain at the Washington Post, people are quite bad at recognizing the emotional state of dogs, even their own. While stuck at home in 2020, Molinaro recorded videos of her dog, Oliver, playing with her father, Rich. There were positive interactions, like when Rich would give Oliver a treat, and negative interactions, like when Rich would bring Oliver face to face with his cat nemesis. The videos were then shown to hundreds of people, who were asked how Oliver was feeling.

When viewers had the full context, they rated Oliver as happy in positive situations and less happy in negative ones. But when the videos were edited to show Oliver alone, with nothing else in the frame, "they couldn't tell us how Oliver was feeling," write Molinaro and Wynne. Questioning whether people could truly tell a happy dog from an unhappy one, Molinaro edited the videos to mix Oliver's negative encounters with his reactions to positive encounters and vice versa. The clips were showed to hundreds more people, who "rated how Oliver was feeling based solely on what Rich was doing." Most surprising, "when Rich watched, even he was stumped as to what his dog was really feeling."

The problem is that humans tend to "look at everything around the dog to guess what our pet must be feeling but fail to look closely at the animal itself," the researchers say. They note it was only in 2012 that research indicated a dog wags its tail to the right when it wants to approach a subject and to the left when it wants to avoid a subject. With more careful study, humans can perhaps become worthy of our furry friends, who seem to easily recognize human emotions and even appear eager to comfort a person in distress, the researchers note. But first, "we need to confront our biases and be more modest in our assessment of canine emotions." Read the piece in full here. (More dogs stories.)