Think you understand your dog? Study suggests you might be highly wrong

Humans may not have a good understanding of dogs' emotions, and it could be because they are projecting their emotions onto the animals, according to new research. While humans and dogs are known to have shared a bond over the centuries, it doesn't mean their emotional processing or even emotional expressions, are the same, according to author Holly Molinaro, an animal welfare scientist and a PhD student of psychology, Arizona State University, US.

For the study, published in the journal Anthrozoos, researchers performed two experiments to look at how a human perceives a dog's emotions. For the first, the team recorded videos of a dog in what they believed were positive or 'happy' or negative (less happy) situations.

While the happy situations included dogs being offered a treat, the unhappy ones involved gentle chastisement, or bringing out the dreaded vacuum cleaner, the researchers said. For the second experiment, the videos were edited such that the dog filmed in a happy context was shown in an unhappy situation, and vice versa.


Over 850 people were recruited for the study. They were shown the videos and asked to rate how happy they thought the dog was. The researchers found that the humans' perception of the dog's mood was based on everything in the videos, besides the dog himself.

"People do not look at what the dog is doing, instead, they look at the situation surrounding the dog and base their emotional perception on that," Molinaro said. She explained that when people saw a video of the dog apparently reacting to a vacuum cleaner, everyone said the dog was feeling bad and agitated.

However, in another video, involving the same behaviour of the dog but in a different context -- "this time appearing to react to seeing his leash" -- the dog was perceived as "feeling happy and calm", Molinaro said. "People were not judging a dog's emotions based on the dog's behaviour, but on the situation the dog was in," she said.

Further complicating the human-dog communication is people's projection of their emotions onto the dog, the researchers added. This 'anthropomorphising' of the interaction further clouds truly understanding what your dog's emotional state actually may be, what she is trying to tell you, they said.

"We highlight that extraneous factors besides the dog itself are major contributing influences on how humans perceive dogs' emotions," the authors wrote.