Dogs Know How You Feel
You cry, they get all emotional, new study finds
When people cry, their dogs grasp the fact that things aren’t well, a type of emotional contagion, new research suggests.
Using citizen scientists to do tests in their homes, the researchers exposed dogs human crying sounds and also mundane humming sounds. The hounds didn’t react much to the hums, but when they heard human crying, the dogs “matched their emotional state with that of the human vocalization they heard, meaning that they displayed more behaviors indicative of high-arousal and negative emotional state,” the researchers reported this month in the journal Animal Behaviour.
For the record, the same tests done with pet pigs didn’t generate much emotional contagion.
The conclusion: Dogs empathize with us because they’ve been evolutionarily selected for cooperation with humans. Pigs not so much.
Past research found dogs sense our emotions just by reading our faces. Examples, as researchers explained in 2018 in the journal Learning & Behavior:
If a dog turns its head to the left, it could be picking up that someone is angry, fearful or happy.
If there is a look of surprise on a person's face, dogs tend to turn their head to the right.
The heart rates of dogs also go up when they see someone who is having a bad day.
Dogs apparently process negative emotions in the brain’s right hemisphere.
"Clearly arousing, negative emotions seem to be processed by the right hemisphere of a dog's brain, and more positive emotions by the left side," said the researchers, Marcello Siniscalchi, Serenella d'Ingeo and Angelo Quaranta of the University of Bari Aldo Moro in Italy.
OK, but mainly… dogs know how you feel!