The World According To Dogs

Most of us do not understand dogs as well as we think we do. We assume we know things, but we often rely on old theories and frequently do not look at actual dog behavior. Instead we should try to think about life from the dog’s perspective. The stories that follow highlight some of the more interesting discoveries that scientists have made about the minds behind all those cute canine faces. The Meaning of Belly-Up When a dog rolls onto its back during play, does the maneuver indicate submission, akin to a person crying “uncle,” or does it signify something else altogether? A study by Kerri Norman, then at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, and her colleagues there and at the University of South Africa comes down on the side of “something else.” Their report appeared in 2015 in an issue of Behavioural Processes devoted to canine behavior.

Credit: Mark Allen Miller

Investigating what behaviors mean during dog-dog play is not new. For example, you have probably heard of play signals that help dogs to clarify play from not play. These signals indicate something like, “Hey, when I just bit you in the face, I didn’t mean it like ‘I’M BITING YOU IN THE FACE.’ It was just for fun. See! Here’s a play bow for additional clarity. All fun here!” Play signals may also include exaggerated, bouncy movements or presentation of a “play face”; they start or maintain play, and they occur around potentially ambiguous behaviors—such as a bite, tackle or mount—or anything that might be misconstrued as not playing. But not all behaviors that appear during play between dogs are as well studied. Outside of play, rolling onto one’s back is often seen as a submissive gesture that curtails or avoids aggression by another dog. In a classic 1967 paper in American Zoologist, Rudolf Schenkel of the University of Basel in Switzerland describes this so-called passive submission as expressing “some kind of timidity and helplessness,” like coming out with your hands up or waving a white flag. Some have suggested that the rollover performed in dog-dog play is about preventing aggression. Owners observing playing dogs from the sidelines often take this a step further—the dog spending more time on its back is labeled “submissive” or “subordinate,” whereas the dog on the top is “dominant.” But what if rolling over means something different during play? Norman and her colleagues wanted to know whether “rolling over onto the back and adopting a supine position” during play is an “act of submission” and serves to stop the interaction or hinder subsequent aggression. Or, they speculated, it might be essentially playful, “executed tactically, for combat purposes,” to encourage play, avoid a play bite (defensive maneuver) or deliver a play bite (offensive maneuver).

The researchers collected data in two contexts: staged play sessions where a medium-sized female dog was paired with 33 new play partners of various breeds and sizes, and 20 YouTube videos where two dogs played together—half the videos paired similarly sized dogs, and the other half had dogs of different relative sizes. Not all observed dogs rolled over during play, particularly in the staged play sessions, where only nine partners rolled over when playing. In the YouTube videos, 27 of the 40 dogs rolled over, and it occurred in both similarly sized and differently sized pairs. If your dog is not a roller during play, he is in good company. For dogs that did roll over, what did it mean? The researchers examined all instances of the behavior to see whether rollovers were associated with submission—decreasing play, remaining passive, or being performed by the “smaller or weaker” partner—or were instead associated with the interactive, fun, combative nature of play, where rollovers preceded “launching an attack (offensive), evading a nape bite (defensive), rolling in front of a potential partner (solicitation) or rolling over in a nonsocial context (other).” The findings are stark: the smaller of the two play partners was not more likely to roll over than the larger dog. Additionally, “most rollovers were defensive and none of the 248 rollovers was submissive.” Most in-play rollovers in the study, the researchers found, were part of play fighting (meaning the fighting was itself playful, not real fighting). But could it be that once dogs are on their back, submission kicks in? For example, a dog could go on its back to avoid a neck bite and then lie motionless, suggestive of passive submission. But that is not what the dogs did. Instead once on their back, dogs in the supine position both blocked playful bites and launched them at their partner. Another way to think about rolling over in play is as a self-handicapping behavior that helps dogs of different sizes or sociabilities play together. Self-handicapping is instrumental to play, and it implies that a dog is tempering its behavior. For example, during play, dogs do not deliver bites at full force, and a larger dog might roll over to allow a smaller dog to jump on or mouth it. Some dogs will even use this behavior to invite bites and solicit play from another dog. It is not safe, then, to assume that a dog sliding onto its back during play is essentially saying, “YOU CAME ON TOO STRONG” or “OKAY, YOU WON THIS ROUND!” In some contexts, this posture is certainly associated with fear or with defusing or preventing aggression, but the recent study reminds us that rolling over, as with many behaviors, does not have a single, universal meaning. Instead it is often just playful. When a Dog Won’t Play You have probably heard the expression, “Life is short: play with your dog.” “Okay!” you think, “I’ll do it!” After all, dogs play together until they are exhausted. They also play with people, although good play is not always a given. Have you ever tried to play with a dog, and it just doesn’t work? “The dog’s not playing right,” you may think. “This stinks.” Don’t be so quick to blame the dog. Research suggests that it might be you who is not “playing right.” In 2001 animal welfare and behavior researcher Nicola Rooney, now at the University of Bristol in England, and her colleagues wanted to know whether dogs respond to people’s play signals. In the study, volunteers played with their dog for five minutes in the comfort of their home, and the sessions were videotaped. Owners were asked to engage with their dog “as they usually did,” but here is the key: they were not allowed to use objects or toys.

After the sessions, the researchers watched the videos and noted which behaviors owners used to initiate or maintain play. They identified 35 common play signals, including patting the floor, clapping, shoving, hitting or tapping the dog and, of course, play bowing. People also blew at dogs, barked at them and grabbed their paws. And who can forget my favorite behavior, “hand spider,” where the “person moved their hand or fingers simulating movement of an insect or other creature.” Did dog owners’ play signals instigate play? And more specifically, did the commonly used signals elicit play more often than the rarely used ones? Of the 35 most common play signals, Rooney and her colleagues found that a signal’s popularity “was not related to its success at initiating or sustaining play.” For example, patting the floor was used most often, but play followed only 38 percent of the time. Other not so successful but commonly used invitations included scruffing the dog and clapping. Some things people did, including picking up or kissing the dog, failed to elicit play during any of the sessions. All is not lost! A few behaviors were incredibly successful. The researchers found that giving chase and running away and lunging forward were associated with play 100 percent of the time. Signaling “up” (tapping one’s chest to entice the dog to jump up), grabbing or holding a dog’s paws, and play bowing also got great results. The study’s conclusion is somewhat somber: “We suggest that humans often use ineffective [play] signals.” Instead of blaming dogs for not playing right, people could evaluate the effects of their own actions, acknowledging that certain signals are better at eliciting play than others. Alexandra Protopopova, now at the Human-Animal Interaction Lab at Texas Tech University, and her colleagues at the Arizona State University Canine Science Collaboratory have highlighted a sad consequence of inept play signaling by humans: it can sabotage adoption of a dog from a shelter. The team found that when a potential adopter takes out a shelter dog for a one-on-one meet and greet, only two behavioral variables predicted whether that dog was leaving the shelter: lying in close proximity to the person and responding to the person’s play solicitation. Dogs lying close to the person were about 14 times more likely to be adopted, and a dog who ignored a person’s play initiation was unlikely to be adopted. Taken together, these two studies paint a potentially scary picture for shelter dogs: people do not always use play signals that result in play, but people are unlikely to adopt a dog that does not respond to their signals. Nobody wins. A subsequent study by Protopopova and her colleagues found that when potential adopters were explicitly told to play with a dog’s preferred toy, not only did social play increase, but so, too, did adoption rate. When I think about dogs in a shelter going up for their one-on-one interviews, I hope potential adopters cut them some slack and do not blame the dogs if they do not grasp overtures for play. The list of factors that could contribute to whether a dog will play with a new, strange human it just met is endless. On top of that, the shelter environment is often a weird, chaotic place, not exactly hospitable to having a fun time. When meeting a dog for the first time, go slowly and keep your expectations in check. For shelter dogs, as with speed dating, a lot is riding on the first encounter. Reflect on your play behaviors just as much as you think about theirs. Is That Really Guilt You See? Live with a dog, and you have most likely met the “guilty look.” You come home. The plants are knocked over, and soil is tracked all over the floor. The dog is abnormally still and averts its gaze as it thumps its tail slowly. But does the dog feel responsible for the mess and sorry about having disobeyed your rules? That is hard to say. Research to date, including an open-access study published in 2015, suggests that the answer is no. Moreover, the findings reveal that scolding or punishing dogs will not necessarily decrease unwanted behavior.

Owners asked to describe a dog’s guilty look comment that, in addition to potentially freezing, looking away and thumping their tails, the dog may try to look smaller and assume a nonthreatening pose. Some might lift a paw or approach the owner in a low posture. Others retreat. It is tempting to think that if a dog acts much as we do when we feel guilty, then the dog must also understand that its behavior was wrong and feel guilty. Yet these are the same actions that animal behavior researchers and experts describe as reflective of submission, appeasement, anxiety or fear. Such displays are employed by social species, such as dogs and wild gray wolves, in many different contexts to reduce conflict, diffuse tension and reinforce social bonds. When we investigators create experiments to better understand dogs’ conceptual frameworks, we often find that although their actions might look much like those of people, their understanding of the situation might differ. In this case, it is possible that rather than guilt operating when your dog puts on a “guilty face,” the pooch may actually be experiencing general anxiety or fear or a desire to avoid being on the wrong end of your anger or frustration. In 2009 Alexandra Horowitz of Barnard College (and author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know) published a study in Behavioural Processes that explored the events preceding the seemingly guilty look. By varying both the dog’s behavior (either eating or not eating a disallowed treat) and the owner’s behavior (either scolding or not scolding), she was able to isolate what the look was associated with. She found that it did not appear more when the dogs had done something wrong. Instead it popped out in full form when the owner scolded. Horowitz further found that when dogs were reprimanded, the most exaggerated guilty look was displayed by the dogs that had not eaten the treat but were reprimanded anyway (because the owner thought the dog had eaten it). That means, for example, that in a multidog household, a dog could easily look guilty without ever having transgressed. I found a similar result in a follow-up experiment that I conducted with Ádám Miklósi and Márta Gácsi of the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and published in 2012 in Applied Animal Behaviour Science. Dogs had the opportunity to break a rule (that food on a table is for humans and not dogs) while owners were out of the room. When the owners returned, dogs that ate were not more likely to look guilty than those that abstained. In this context, the guilty look was not present without a scolding owner. We also looked at whether owners are better able than others to tell when their dogs have been disobedient. Owners who had seen their companions adhere to the rule were not better at identifying that the dogs had transgressed in their absence. “But wait!” the peanut gallery cries. “I have seen my dog act guilty before it is scolded.” Owners often do interpret such behavior to mean that dogs “know” they have done wrong. This is a complicated issue, but findings to date suggest that dogs engage in guilty-seeming behavior when they sense that something will elicit an owner’s displeasure and hope to avoid a breach in the relationship. Ljerka Ostojić and Nicola Clayton of the University of Cambridge and Mladenka Tkalčić of the University of Rijeka in Croatia reported in 2015 in an open-access article in Behavioural Processes on whether a dog’s guilty look could be triggered by environmental cues, such as the disappearance of a forbidden food. By using a manipulation somewhat similar to that of Horowitz, Ostojić and her colleagues found that the guilty look was not affected by the dog’s own behavior (either eating or not eating the food) or whether the food was present or absent. In their experimental context, dogs did not display the guilty look in the absence of a scolding owner. At the same time, the study does not exclude the possibility that in the home environment, owners may very well observe the infamous look prior to scolding. In the late 1970s a veterinarian in Wisconsin published a paper offering a clear example of fear masquerading as guilt. A dog called Nicki had taken to shredding paper in the owner’s absence. To see if the dog’s guilty-seeming behavior actually stemmed from guilt, the veterinarian had the owner shred paper, leave the house and return home. When the owner came back, Nicki looked “guilty,” even though she had done nothing wrong. Dogs are incredibly sensitive to environmental and social cues. In this case, the dog apparently viewed the paper on the floor as a sign of a scolding to come. “Evidence + Owner = Trouble,” explains primatologist Frans de Waal, in Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. As a social species aiming to maintain relationships, dogs could show submissive displays before an owner scolds without the behavior indicating an apology or admittance of guilt. Instead these displays can aim to appease or pacify. And they certainly could have that effect: in one study, I found that nearly 60 percent of owners surveyed on a questionnaire reported that the “guilty look” led them to scold their dog less. You may wonder why I and others harp on the misattribution of a sense of guilt in dogs. As I have said online in The Dodo, this is an issue about dog welfare: “When you get angry or forgive your ‘guilty’ dog for demolishing your house, you ignore deeper concerns that, if addressed, could reduce or eliminate those behavior problems. Was the dog bored? Scared? Anxious? Did something change in your routine that confused it? Sadly, scolding dogs often does not decrease future undesirable behavior. If anything, the ‘guilty look’ could just become more exaggerated over time as your confused companion enters an anxious cycle of destruction and appeasement.” Even worse, scolding a guilty-looking dog after the fact could give you a false sense of mutual understanding and the incorrect belief that you are punishing the bad behavior effectively. A punishment, by definition, decreases the behavior in the future. Unfortunately, studies find that scolding a “disobedient” dog, especially after it misbehaves, does not lead to a notable decrease in the “bad” behavior. A study from the late 1960s found that dogs reprimanded just 15 seconds after performing a “disallowed” behavior not only continued to perform the behavior in the future but did so while showing notable appeasement and fear-related behaviors. Beratement after the fact does not work, and the guilty look is better interpreted as fear or appeasement. Best to just clean up the mess and think about how to avoid it in the future. Why Dogs Like People Do you ever wonder what makes some dogs so into us? Why at any moment Pluto might propel himself into Mickey’s arms, giving Mickey a full-on scrub down with his tongue? Why some dogs want to meet everybody, whereas others would prefer you stay right where you are? A 2014 study published in PLOS ONE by researchers led by Anna Kis and Melinda Bence, now at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, researchers at the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and others used a novel method to explore the role that oxytocin plays in dogs’ sociability toward humans. Maybe you have heard oxytocin described as the “love hormone” because of its involvement in social interactions, stress relief and feelings of connectedness with other people. Spend time petting your dog, scratching Pluto’s body and ears, and you are both apt to see increases in the oxytocin levels in your blood, indicating a positive experience for you both. Yet oxytocin is also not simple. Science writer Ed Yong points out in a 2012 Slate article: “The ‘love hormone’ fosters trust and generosity in some situations but envy and bias in others, and it can produce opposite effects in different people.” Part of the story could be that variations in the gene that codes for the oxytocin receptor—the molecule that oxytocin binds to on nerve cells in the brain—mediate differences in social behavior. To investigate whether Pluto’s exuberance for Mickey and “people” in general is somehow associated with Pluto’s genes, Kis and her colleagues took the following approach:

Credit: Mark Allen Miller

Step 1. Get to know the dog oxytocin receptor (OXTR) gene. For this study, the researchers selected dogs from two popular breeds, German shepherds and Border collies, and extracted DNA by swabbing the insides of their cheeks. This process ultimately identified three variations of the OXTR gene, each of which comes in two forms, with the forms seemingly having different effects on behavior. The three variations, or “polymorphisms,” have the incredibly easy names of –212AG, 19131AG and rs8679684. Step 2. Get a sense of how the dogs interact with people. More than 200 German shepherds and Border collies living as pets participated in a series of interactions with people. The tests investigated how dogs greeted both a known and an unknown person, how dogs responded to a stranger approaching in a threatening manner, and how dogs responded when their owner hid behind a large tree. Step 3. Bring dog genes and dog behavior together. The researchers examined whether there was a relation between the OXTR polymorphisms and the way the dogs interacted with people during the social tests. They were particularly interested in how readily dogs approached people, as well as the canines’ level of friendliness. Describing the results, Kis says that “the way dogs behave toward humans, at least among German shepherds and Border collies, is influenced by the oxytocin receptor gene.” For example, when it came to the –212AG gene, both German shepherds and Border collies carrying the form, or allele, known as G showed less interest in being around people than did those with the allele called A, suggesting the effect was the same in both breeds. Yet analysis of the genes 19131AG and rs8679684 revealed opposite trends in the two breeds. For example, in the 19131AG polymorphism, the investigators report, “the presence of the A allele, as opposed to the G allele, was associated with higher friendliness scores in German Shepherds and lower friendliness scores in Border Collies.” This opposite effect suggests that “other genetic and cellular mechanisms (unexplored in the present study) might play a role in the regulation of this behavior besides our candidate gene.” Overall, then, the study indicates that dog sociability toward people is related to the varieties in the OXTR gene they possess but that oxytocin is “part of a bigger system” contributing to dogs’ feelings toward humans. Next up for this line of research: replication and the exploration of possible molecular interactions that account for the effects that particular oxytocin receptor variants have on dogs’ behavior toward people. Beware the Fear Knowing when a dog is happy is easy, but spotting fear is a lot harder, as Michele Wan, a certified applied animal behaviorist, and her colleagues showed in research examining whether people’s perceptions of dogs’ emotions vary according to experience. In the study, published in 2012 in PLOS ONE, volunteers—who were grouped as having little or no experience with dogs, having lived with a dog at some point, or working with dogs for more or less than 10 years—watched short video clips of dogs. Volunteers were asked to describe the dogs’ emotional state and noted which body parts tipped them off. Because the videos had no sound, participants had to rely on behavior to label a dog as, say, fearful or happy. These videos were not just any videos. They had been prescreened by dog-behavior experts whose schooling or professional experience had trained them to make science-based assessments of animal behavior.

Happy dogs proved easiest to identify. Even people with little dog experience could watch a dog frolicking in the snow or rolling joyfully on its back and describe that dog as happy. But fear was different. Study participants who were dog professionals did a better job identifying fear compared with both dog owners and people with little dog experience. “It did not matter whether the dog professionals were relative newcomers to the field, had worked with dogs for less than 10 years, or were longtime professionals with 10 or more years of experience,” Wan adds. “They had the same proficiency in identifying fear.” One reason that the dog professionals did so much better could be that they looked at more dog body parts for clues, such as the eyes, ears, mouth and tongue, whereas nonprofessionals looked at fewer body parts and were less likely to tune into dogs’ facial features. Fortunately, you can learn how to notice and interpret subtle canine behaviors. Indeed, even if you live with the most happy-go-lucky dog on the planet, fear should still be on your radar, especially if your dog ever interacts with other dogs. Recognizing fear in another dog can help you know to give that dog space; the owner can take it from there. What does fear look like? It can include a wide variety of body parts and postures. Wan and her colleagues explain that “fearful dogs are said to reduce their body size—crouching into a low posture, flattening their ears and holding their tails in a low position. Shaking, yawning, salivation, freezing, panting, paw lifting and vocalizing are examples of other behaviors that have been associated with fear in dogs.” It is possible to help dogs become less fearful. Noticing fear and related behaviors is the first step; identifying and modifying an animal’s perception of fear-inducing stimuli is just as important. Picture a dog that is afraid of new people coming to the home, everyone from the postal delivery worker to your best friend. But now, when anyone comes to the home, the dog gets pieces of its most favorite food. Through counterconditioning, visitors gradually assume a new meaning as the dog associates people coming over with a good thing, in this case yummy food. As the dog’s emotions shift, so, too, does its behavior—fearful postures fade away to reveal a dog anticipating something good, a dog essentially saying, “OMG!! A NEW PERSON IS HERE!! YES!!” A happy dog is born.

Credit: Mark Allen Miller

What Barks Say Although at times your dog makes vocalizations that might be unwelcome, those sounds carry much information and meaning. In recent years many studies have investigated the noises made by companion dogs. One major finding: dogs bark differently in various contexts, and we can tell the difference. A 2004 study by Sophia Yin and Brenda McCowan in Animal Behaviour reported that “disturbance barks” (emitted in response to a stranger ringing the doorbell) sound different from “isolation barks” (when a dog is separated from an owner) and barks emitted during play. In each context, the acoustics differ: whereas disturbance barks are “relatively low-pitched, harsh barks with little variation in pitch or loudness,” isolation barks are “higher pitched, more tonal and more frequency modulated than the disturbance barks,” and play barks are “similar to the isolation barks except that they usually occurred in clusters rather than singly.” Instead of seeing barks as meaningless noise, pay attention. Banjo might be yipping because he is alone, or he may have noticed that someone uninvited is climbing in through your second-floor window. Dog barks are full of information, but what about growls? Anna Taylor, now at the Queen’s University (Ontario) Bader International Study Center in England, found that, unlike barks, many acoustic properties of growls in a play and aggressive context are alike. But aggressive growls were longer than play growls, and play growls had a shorter pause between growls. Although growls from different contexts can sound similar to human ears, Tamás Faragó and his colleagues at the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest found that growls carry considerable meaning in dog-dog communication. In a 2010 study published in Animal Behaviour, dogs were placed in a room with a bone; as they approached the bone, researchers played a recording of one of three different types of growls. Dogs responded to the “this is my food” growl by backing away from the bone and, for the most part, ignored the “go away stranger” and the play growls because those sounds were not relevant to the bone. All growls are not the same, and dogs know it. Even though not all growls are associated with aggression, an aggressive growl should not be ignored. If you come across a situation where growling could be a sign of aggression, keep your cool, though. Jolanta Benal, author of the 2011 The Dog Trainer’s Guide to a Happy, Well-Behaved Pet (Quick and Dirty Tips), reminds: if you punish a dog for growling, you are essentially punishing it for giving a warning. Growling is a form of communication related to emotional or inner states in a particular context. If you want to decrease it, think about what is prompting it. The growling itself is not a problem.

Credit: Tim Macpherson Getty Images

When We’re Angry, Dogs Get the Feels Dog lovers may find it obvious that dogs pick up on our emotions. Attending to our emotional expression—in our faces, behavior or even smell—helps them live intimately by our side. “Dogs get us,” we say. End of story. Yet what about their side of the story? If dogs attend to our emotions—particularly those we wear on our faces—how might dogs feel when they see our different emotions? An answer to this question arose almost by accident. In 2015 Corsin A. Müller and his colleagues at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, published a study that sought to determine whether dogs can discern happy and angry expressions in human faces, as opposed to relying on other cues (their finding: yes, dogs can get this information from our faces alone). Because of the study design, the researchers could also peer into how dogs might feel about our emotions. In the study, pet dogs saw images of happy or angry human faces on a computer screen. To get a treat, the dogs had to approach and nose-touch a particular image on the screen. These are dogs. They can do this. Nose-touch for a treat? Yes, please! But when viewing the angry faces, the researchers noticed something odd. Dog performance was affected by whether they saw happy or angry expressions. During the initial training, dogs seeing the angry expression took longer to learn to approach and nose-touch the image for a treat than did dogs that saw the happy expression. In other words, dogs were less inclined to approach and nose-touch angry faces, even though doing so would yield a treat. “Why would I approach an angry person? That makes no sense,” a dog might think. Through past experiences with people, dogs could come to view the angry expression as aversive. The researchers suggest that dogs “had to overcome their natural tendency to move away from aversive (or threatening) stimuli.” Reluctance to approach is only one way to assess how dogs perceive our emotions. To tackle the same question, a study published in January 2018 in Behavioural Processes turned to a subtle and often overlooked behavior that you might spot more often after today.

How do dogs feel when they see our different emotions? Credit: Getty Images

Natalia Albuquerque of the University of Lincoln in England and the University of São Paulo in Brazil and her colleagues presented dogs with images of angry and happy faces. The researchers found that when dogs looked at images of angry human faces, they were more likely to mouth-lick than when they saw happy human faces. And we are not talking about “yum … food” mouth-licking. Mouth-licking, the scientists say, “is believed to be an indicator of short-term (or acute) stress responses.” This behavior has been identified in stressful contexts such as when a dog is startled by a loud noise or when a dog is alone and experiencing separation-related issues. In social situations, a quick in/out of the tongue may suggest emotional conflict and could be accompanied by other subtle behaviors that indicate, “Umm… interact? No, I’d rather keep my distance, thanks.” Licking is also commonly found in appeasement or pacifying contexts. Unlike trembling, whining, excessive barking and panting—which owners more regularly identify as stress-related—people are less likely to identify subtle behaviors such as looking away, turning the head, yawning and lip-licking as possible indicators of dog discomfort. Now it should make more sense why the researchers looked at dog mouth-licking: “As the mouth-licking behavior was associated with the viewing of negative faces,” they explain, “it is likely that these negative emotional visual stimuli were perceived as aversive by the dogs.” A canine’s extended tongue should be on dog lovers’ radar. To clarify, we are not talking about just any tongue extension, such as those associated with food, or a happy dog’s lolling tongue, or a tongue engaged in licking someone. Though inconsistently labeled and described in the literature, the tongue extension we are discussing is generally described as an in/out of the tongue that may (or may not) go over the nose. Out in the real world, dogs may display this type of tongue extension in concert with behaviors such as lifting a paw, yawning, turning the head and looking away, being still, moving away or making the body smaller. Seems like we are going to need a bigger radar. “If a dog starts tongue-flicking and turning his head when I reach to pet him, I’m going to pay a lot of attention to it and probably change my own behavior,” offers Patricia McConnell, a certified applied animal behaviorist. So dogs do indeed attend to our emotional expression. That is our part of the story. Their part of the story is written in their behavior.

Does Your Pooch Love You? The answer may surprise you By Jason G. Goldman You love your dog. Does your dog love you back? A group of Swedish and Danish researchers went looking for an answer. More specifically, knowing that dogs are highly attuned to cues from humans, the researchers suspected that dogs belonging to owners who felt they had a great relationship with their pets would also perceive that the relationship was close, perhaps because the owners’ attitude would lead to a high frequency of positive interactions between the duo. Twenty dog-owner pairs participated in the study, which was led by Therese Rehn of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and published in the January 2014 issue of Applied Animal Behaviour Science. The humans all completed a questionnaire called the Monash Dog Owner Relationship Scale (MDORS), which was designed to evaluate the strength of the relationship from the perspective of the owner. The MDORS contains 28 items divided into three subscales. The first subscale assesses the nature of the dog-owner interactions (“How often do you hug your dog?”), the second reflects the emotional closeness that the owner feels toward his or her dog (“I wish my dog and I never had to be apart”), and the third concerns the perceived investment required to care for a dog (“My dog costs too much money”). The dogs were thrust into a modified version of the Ainsworth “strange situation” procedure, a clever experiment originally designed to measure the strength of human parent-child relationships. It centers on a child—or dog—being left alone with a stranger. The doggy version begins with the owner sitting in a chair ignoring the dog. After a few minutes, a stranger comes into the room and, ignoring the dog, talks to the owner. The stranger attempts to play with the dog, and then the owner quietly leaves the room. The stranger continues to engage the dog in play and then exits, leaving the dog alone. The owner returns, greets the dog and begins ignoring it again. The stranger returns, greets the dog and ignores it as well. Finally, the owner leaves once more. When conducted with human toddlers, the slightly distressing nature of the strange situation activates an innate, adaptive system that motivates the child to seek comfort from the parent. By carefully observing the children and weighing their comfort-seeking behaviors against their more independent exploration behaviors, researchers can determine whether or not children have secure emotional attachments to their parents. Children who feel more securely attached are more likely to seek closeness with Mom or Dad when stressed but also to play independently once they feel comfortable. The researchers predicted that canines whose owners perceived their relationship with their pets to be strongest would behave in ways indicative of strong bonding during the test. Instead they found only two significant correlations. When dogs were reunited with their owners after being alone, those whose owners reported having a lot of interactions with the animals sought out such interactions more—which might look like strong attachment but could equally have been a reflection of past rewards for initiating physical contact. And unlike securely attached toddlers, canines of such owners were less likely than others to play independently in the strange situation. In that way, they resembled insecurely attached youngsters. Dogs are not children, though, and did not show the separation anxiety that insecurely attached children display; thus, the latter finding is hard to interpret. This study marks one of the first attempts to scientifically probe the connection between dogs’ perceptions of their bond with their owners and owners’ perceptions of their bond with their dogs. And here’s the bad news for all those dog lovers who are just certain that Fluffy loves them back: there was no correlation between the “perceived emotional closeness” subscale of the MDORS questionnaire and the dogs’ behavior in the strange situation. The researchers put it bluntly: “There was no evidence to support the view that because a person has a strong emotional bond to their dog, their dog is similarly attached to them.” You cannot simply love a dog so much that it will be forced to love you back. Jason G. Goldman (@jgold85) is a science journalist based in Los Angeles.

Wanted! Citizen Researchers Don’t let these projects pass you by Over the past few years public participation in science projects has surged, and research involving dogs is no exception. Often the work consists of online activities, but sometimes it requires participants to go into the world, do something and report back. Here’s a list of online dog science projects that are active and that, in most cases, anyone in the world can join. —J.H. Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Attachment Bond between Humans and Pet Dogs Human-Animal Interaction Lab, Oregon State University www.thehumananimalbond.com/current-studies/cross-cultural-attachment Researchers are studying attachment relationships between pet dogs and their owners in different demographic groups. Dog Personality Survey Animal Behaviour Cognition and Welfare Group, University of Lincoln, England http://uoldogtemperament.co.uk/dogpersonality These projects aim to identify robust personality traits in dogs. Family Dog Project Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest https://familydogproject.elte.hu/participate-in-our-research Researchers would you like you to report on your dog in one of several different projects:

Breeding environment, genes and behavior Emotional assessment of dog whines Separation behavior query Dogs’ vocalization questionnaire Dogs’ personality and certain diseases Jealousy in dogs Is your dog loud? Emotional content of sounds

Woof! Acoustic Engineering, University of Salford, England www.sound101.org/woof/index.php This project explores how people respond to dog barks. Canine Behavior Assessment & Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ) Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society, University of Pennsylvania http://vetapps.vet.upenn.edu/cbarq C-BARQ provides standardized evaluations of canine temperament and behavior.

The Meaning of Belly-Up

When a dog rolls onto its back during play, does the maneuver indicate submission, akin to a person crying “uncle,” or does it signify something else altogether? A study by Kerri Norman, then at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, and her colleagues there and at the University of South Africa comes down on the side of “something else.” Their report appeared in 2015 in an issue of Behavioural Processes devoted to canine behavior.

Credit: Mark Allen Miller

Outside of play, rolling onto one’s back is often seen as a submissive gesture that curtails or avoids aggression by another dog. In a classic 1967 paper in American Zoologist, Rudolf Schenkel of the University of Basel in Switzerland describes this so-called passive submission as expressing “some kind of timidity and helplessness,” like coming out with your hands up or waving a white flag.

Some have suggested that the rollover performed in dog-dog play is about preventing aggression. Owners observing playing dogs from the sidelines often take this a step further—the dog spending more time on its back is labeled “submissive” or “subordinate,” whereas the dog on the top is “dominant.”

But what if rolling over means something different during play? Norman and her colleagues wanted to know whether “rolling over onto the back and adopting a supine position” during play is an “act of submission” and serves to stop the interaction or hinder subsequent aggression. Or, they speculated, it might be essentially playful, “executed tactically, for combat purposes,” to encourage play, avoid a play bite (defensive maneuver) or deliver a play bite (offensive maneuver).

Not all observed dogs rolled over during play, particularly in the staged play sessions, where only nine partners rolled over when playing. In the YouTube videos, 27 of the 40 dogs rolled over, and it occurred in both similarly sized and differently sized pairs. If your dog is not a roller during play, he is in good company.

For dogs that did roll over, what did it mean? The researchers examined all instances of the behavior to see whether rollovers were associated with submission—decreasing play, remaining passive, or being performed by the “smaller or weaker” partner—or were instead associated with the interactive, fun, combative nature of play, where rollovers preceded “launching an attack (offensive), evading a nape bite (defensive), rolling in front of a potential partner (solicitation) or rolling over in a nonsocial context (other).”

The findings are stark: the smaller of the two play partners was not more likely to roll over than the larger dog. Additionally, “most rollovers were defensive and none of the 248 rollovers was submissive.” Most in-play rollovers in the study, the researchers found, were part of play fighting (meaning the fighting was itself playful, not real fighting).

But could it be that once dogs are on their back, submission kicks in? For example, a dog could go on its back to avoid a neck bite and then lie motionless, suggestive of passive submission. But that is not what the dogs did. Instead once on their back, dogs in the supine position both blocked playful bites and launched them at their partner.

Another way to think about rolling over in play is as a self-handicapping behavior that helps dogs of different sizes or sociabilities play together. Self-handicapping is instrumental to play, and it implies that a dog is tempering its behavior. For example, during play, dogs do not deliver bites at full force, and a larger dog might roll over to allow a smaller dog to jump on or mouth it. Some dogs will even use this behavior to invite bites and solicit play from another dog.

It is not safe, then, to assume that a dog sliding onto its back during play is essentially saying, “YOU CAME ON TOO STRONG” or “OKAY, YOU WON THIS ROUND!” In some contexts, this posture is certainly associated with fear or with defusing or preventing aggression, but the recent study reminds us that rolling over, as with many behaviors, does not have a single, universal meaning. Instead it is often just playful.

When a Dog Won’t Play

You have probably heard the expression, “Life is short: play with your dog.” “Okay!” you think, “I’ll do it!” After all, dogs play together until they are exhausted. They also play with people, although good play is not always a given. Have you ever tried to play with a dog, and it just doesn’t work? “The dog’s not playing right,” you may think. “This stinks.”

Don’t be so quick to blame the dog. Research suggests that it might be you who is not “playing right.”

In 2001 animal welfare and behavior researcher Nicola Rooney, now at the University of Bristol in England, and her colleagues wanted to know whether dogs respond to people’s play signals. In the study, volunteers played with their dog for five minutes in the comfort of their home, and the sessions were videotaped. Owners were asked to engage with their dog “as they usually did,” but here is the key: they were not allowed to use objects or toys.

Did dog owners’ play signals instigate play? And more specifically, did the commonly used signals elicit play more often than the rarely used ones?

Of the 35 most common play signals, Rooney and her colleagues found that a signal’s popularity “was not related to its success at initiating or sustaining play.” For example, patting the floor was used most often, but play followed only 38 percent of the time. Other not so successful but commonly used invitations included scruffing the dog and clapping. Some things people did, including picking up or kissing the dog, failed to elicit play during any of the sessions.

All is not lost! A few behaviors were incredibly successful. The researchers found that giving chase and running away and lunging forward were associated with play 100 percent of the time. Signaling “up” (tapping one’s chest to entice the dog to jump up), grabbing or holding a dog’s paws, and play bowing also got great results.

The study’s conclusion is somewhat somber: “We suggest that humans often use ineffective [play] signals.” Instead of blaming dogs for not playing right, people could evaluate the effects of their own actions, acknowledging that certain signals are better at eliciting play than others.

Alexandra Protopopova, now at the Human-Animal Interaction Lab at Texas Tech University, and her colleagues at the Arizona State University Canine Science Collaboratory have highlighted a sad consequence of inept play signaling by humans: it can sabotage adoption of a dog from a shelter. The team found that when a potential adopter takes out a shelter dog for a one-on-one meet and greet, only two behavioral variables predicted whether that dog was leaving the shelter: lying in close proximity to the person and responding to the person’s play solicitation. Dogs lying close to the person were about 14 times more likely to be adopted, and a dog who ignored a person’s play initiation was unlikely to be adopted.

Taken together, these two studies paint a potentially scary picture for shelter dogs: people do not always use play signals that result in play, but people are unlikely to adopt a dog that does not respond to their signals. Nobody wins.

A subsequent study by Protopopova and her colleagues found that when potential adopters were explicitly told to play with a dog’s preferred toy, not only did social play increase, but so, too, did adoption rate.

When I think about dogs in a shelter going up for their one-on-one interviews, I hope potential adopters cut them some slack and do not blame the dogs if they do not grasp overtures for play. The list of factors that could contribute to whether a dog will play with a new, strange human it just met is endless. On top of that, the shelter environment is often a weird, chaotic place, not exactly hospitable to having a fun time.

When meeting a dog for the first time, go slowly and keep your expectations in check. For shelter dogs, as with speed dating, a lot is riding on the first encounter. Reflect on your play behaviors just as much as you think about theirs.

Is That Really Guilt You See?

Live with a dog, and you have most likely met the “guilty look.” You come home. The plants are knocked over, and soil is tracked all over the floor. The dog is abnormally still and averts its gaze as it thumps its tail slowly.

But does the dog feel responsible for the mess and sorry about having disobeyed your rules? That is hard to say. Research to date, including an open-access study published in 2015, suggests that the answer is no. Moreover, the findings reveal that scolding or punishing dogs will not necessarily decrease unwanted behavior.

It is tempting to think that if a dog acts much as we do when we feel guilty, then the dog must also understand that its behavior was wrong and feel guilty. Yet these are the same actions that animal behavior researchers and experts describe as reflective of submission, appeasement, anxiety or fear. Such displays are employed by social species, such as dogs and wild gray wolves, in many different contexts to reduce conflict, diffuse tension and reinforce social bonds.

When we investigators create experiments to better understand dogs’ conceptual frameworks, we often find that although their actions might look much like those of people, their understanding of the situation might differ. In this case, it is possible that rather than guilt operating when your dog puts on a “guilty face,” the pooch may actually be experiencing general anxiety or fear or a desire to avoid being on the wrong end of your anger or frustration.

In 2009 Alexandra Horowitz of Barnard College (and author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know) published a study in Behavioural Processes that explored the events preceding the seemingly guilty look. By varying both the dog’s behavior (either eating or not eating a disallowed treat) and the owner’s behavior (either scolding or not scolding), she was able to isolate what the look was associated with. She found that it did not appear more when the dogs had done something wrong. Instead it popped out in full form when the owner scolded. Horowitz further found that when dogs were reprimanded, the most exaggerated guilty look was displayed by the dogs that had not eaten the treat but were reprimanded anyway (because the owner thought the dog had eaten it). That means, for example, that in a multidog household, a dog could easily look guilty without ever having transgressed.

I found a similar result in a follow-up experiment that I conducted with Ádám Miklósi and Márta Gácsi of the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and published in 2012 in Applied Animal Behaviour Science. Dogs had the opportunity to break a rule (that food on a table is for humans and not dogs) while owners were out of the room. When the owners returned, dogs that ate were not more likely to look guilty than those that abstained. In this context, the guilty look was not present without a scolding owner. We also looked at whether owners are better able than others to tell when their dogs have been disobedient. Owners who had seen their companions adhere to the rule were not better at identifying that the dogs had transgressed in their absence.

“But wait!” the peanut gallery cries. “I have seen my dog act guilty before it is scolded.” Owners often do interpret such behavior to mean that dogs “know” they have done wrong. This is a complicated issue, but findings to date suggest that dogs engage in guilty-seeming behavior when they sense that something will elicit an owner’s displeasure and hope to avoid a breach in the relationship.

Ljerka Ostojić and Nicola Clayton of the University of Cambridge and Mladenka Tkalčić of the University of Rijeka in Croatia reported in 2015 in an open-access article in Behavioural Processes on whether a dog’s guilty look could be triggered by environmental cues, such as the disappearance of a forbidden food. By using a manipulation somewhat similar to that of Horowitz, Ostojić and her colleagues found that the guilty look was not affected by the dog’s own behavior (either eating or not eating the food) or whether the food was present or absent. In their experimental context, dogs did not display the guilty look in the absence of a scolding owner.

At the same time, the study does not exclude the possibility that in the home environment, owners may very well observe the infamous look prior to scolding. In the late 1970s a veterinarian in Wisconsin published a paper offering a clear example of fear masquerading as guilt. A dog called Nicki had taken to shredding paper in the owner’s absence. To see if the dog’s guilty-seeming behavior actually stemmed from guilt, the veterinarian had the owner shred paper, leave the house and return home. When the owner came back, Nicki looked “guilty,” even though she had done nothing wrong. Dogs are incredibly sensitive to environmental and social cues. In this case, the dog apparently viewed the paper on the floor as a sign of a scolding to come.

“Evidence + Owner = Trouble,” explains primatologist Frans de Waal, in Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. As a social species aiming to maintain relationships, dogs could show submissive displays before an owner scolds without the behavior indicating an apology or admittance of guilt. Instead these displays can aim to appease or pacify. And they certainly could have that effect: in one study, I found that nearly 60 percent of owners surveyed on a questionnaire reported that the “guilty look” led them to scold their dog less.

You may wonder why I and others harp on the misattribution of a sense of guilt in dogs. As I have said online in The Dodo, this is an issue about dog welfare: “When you get angry or forgive your ‘guilty’ dog for demolishing your house, you ignore deeper concerns that, if addressed, could reduce or eliminate those behavior problems. Was the dog bored? Scared? Anxious? Did something change in your routine that confused it? Sadly, scolding dogs often does not decrease future undesirable behavior. If anything, the ‘guilty look’ could just become more exaggerated over time as your confused companion enters an anxious cycle of destruction and appeasement.”

Even worse, scolding a guilty-looking dog after the fact could give you a false sense of mutual understanding and the incorrect belief that you are punishing the bad behavior effectively. A punishment, by definition, decreases the behavior in the future. Unfortunately, studies find that scolding a “disobedient” dog, especially after it misbehaves, does not lead to a notable decrease in the “bad” behavior. A study from the late 1960s found that dogs reprimanded just 15 seconds after performing a “disallowed” behavior not only continued to perform the behavior in the future but did so while showing notable appeasement and fear-related behaviors.

Beratement after the fact does not work, and the guilty look is better interpreted as fear or appeasement. Best to just clean up the mess and think about how to avoid it in the future.

Why Dogs Like People

Do you ever wonder what makes some dogs so into us? Why at any moment Pluto might propel himself into Mickey’s arms, giving Mickey a full-on scrub down with his tongue? Why some dogs want to meet everybody, whereas others would prefer you stay right where you are?

A 2014 study published in PLOS ONE by researchers led by Anna Kis and Melinda Bence, now at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, researchers at the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and others used a novel method to explore the role that oxytocin plays in dogs’ sociability toward humans.

Maybe you have heard oxytocin described as the “love hormone” because of its involvement in social interactions, stress relief and feelings of connectedness with other people. Spend time petting your dog, scratching Pluto’s body and ears, and you are both apt to see increases in the oxytocin levels in your blood, indicating a positive experience for you both. Yet oxytocin is also not simple. Science writer Ed Yong points out in a 2012 Slate article: “The ‘love hormone’ fosters trust and generosity in some situations but envy and bias in others, and it can produce opposite effects in different people.” Part of the story could be that variations in the gene that codes for the oxytocin receptor—the molecule that oxytocin binds to on nerve cells in the brain—mediate differences in social behavior.

To investigate whether Pluto’s exuberance for Mickey and “people” in general is somehow associated with Pluto’s genes, Kis and her colleagues took the following approach:

Step 2. Get a sense of how the dogs interact with people. More than 200 German shepherds and Border collies living as pets participated in a series of interactions with people. The tests investigated how dogs greeted both a known and an unknown person, how dogs responded to a stranger approaching in a threatening manner, and how dogs responded when their owner hid behind a large tree.

Step 3. Bring dog genes and dog behavior together. The researchers examined whether there was a relation between the OXTR polymorphisms and the way the dogs interacted with people during the social tests. They were particularly interested in how readily dogs approached people, as well as the canines’ level of friendliness.

Describing the results, Kis says that “the way dogs behave toward humans, at least among German shepherds and Border collies, is influenced by the oxytocin receptor gene.” For example, when it came to the –212AG gene, both German shepherds and Border collies carrying the form, or allele, known as G showed less interest in being around people than did those with the allele called A, suggesting the effect was the same in both breeds.

Yet analysis of the genes 19131AG and rs8679684 revealed opposite trends in the two breeds. For example, in the 19131AG polymorphism, the investigators report, “the presence of the A allele, as opposed to the G allele, was associated with higher friendliness scores in German Shepherds and lower friendliness scores in Border Collies.” This opposite effect suggests that “other genetic and cellular mechanisms (unexplored in the present study) might play a role in the regulation of this behavior besides our candidate gene.”

Overall, then, the study indicates that dog sociability toward people is related to the varieties in the OXTR gene they possess but that oxytocin is “part of a bigger system” contributing to dogs’ feelings toward humans.

Next up for this line of research: replication and the exploration of possible molecular interactions that account for the effects that particular oxytocin receptor variants have on dogs’ behavior toward people.

Beware the Fear

Knowing when a dog is happy is easy, but spotting fear is a lot harder, as Michele Wan, a certified applied animal behaviorist, and her colleagues showed in research examining whether people’s perceptions of dogs’ emotions vary according to experience. In the study, published in 2012 in PLOS ONE, volunteers—who were grouped as having little or no experience with dogs, having lived with a dog at some point, or working with dogs for more or less than 10 years—watched short video clips of dogs. Volunteers were asked to describe the dogs’ emotional state and noted which body parts tipped them off. Because the videos had no sound, participants had to rely on behavior to label a dog as, say, fearful or happy. These videos were not just any videos. They had been prescreened by dog-behavior experts whose schooling or professional experience had trained them to make science-based assessments of animal behavior.

Happy dogs proved easiest to identify. Even people with little dog experience could watch a dog frolicking in the snow or rolling joyfully on its back and describe that dog as happy.

But fear was different. Study participants who were dog professionals did a better job identifying fear compared with both dog owners and people with little dog experience. “It did not matter whether the dog professionals were relative newcomers to the field, had worked with dogs for less than 10 years, or were longtime professionals with 10 or more years of experience,” Wan adds. “They had the same proficiency in identifying fear.”

One reason that the dog professionals did so much better could be that they looked at more dog body parts for clues, such as the eyes, ears, mouth and tongue, whereas nonprofessionals looked at fewer body parts and were less likely to tune into dogs’ facial features.

Fortunately, you can learn how to notice and interpret subtle canine behaviors. Indeed, even if you live with the most happy-go-lucky dog on the planet, fear should still be on your radar, especially if your dog ever interacts with other dogs. Recognizing fear in another dog can help you know to give that dog space; the owner can take it from there.

What does fear look like? It can include a wide variety of body parts and postures. Wan and her colleagues explain that “fearful dogs are said to reduce their body size—crouching into a low posture, flattening their ears and holding their tails in a low position. Shaking, yawning, salivation, freezing, panting, paw lifting and vocalizing are examples of other behaviors that have been associated with fear in dogs.”

It is possible to help dogs become less fearful. Noticing fear and related behaviors is the first step; identifying and modifying an animal’s perception of fear-inducing stimuli is just as important. Picture a dog that is afraid of new people coming to the home, everyone from the postal delivery worker to your best friend. But now, when anyone comes to the home, the dog gets pieces of its most favorite food. Through counterconditioning, visitors gradually assume a new meaning as the dog associates people coming over with a good thing, in this case yummy food. As the dog’s emotions shift, so, too, does its behavior—fearful postures fade away to reveal a dog anticipating something good, a dog essentially saying, “OMG!! A NEW PERSON IS HERE!! YES!!” A happy dog is born.

What Barks Say

Although at times your dog makes vocalizations that might be unwelcome, those sounds carry much information and meaning. In recent years many studies have investigated the noises made by companion dogs.

One major finding: dogs bark differently in various contexts, and we can tell the difference. A 2004 study by Sophia Yin and Brenda McCowan in Animal Behaviour reported that “disturbance barks” (emitted in response to a stranger ringing the doorbell) sound different from “isolation barks” (when a dog is separated from an owner) and barks emitted during play. In each context, the acoustics differ: whereas disturbance barks are “relatively low-pitched, harsh barks with little variation in pitch or loudness,” isolation barks are “higher pitched, more tonal and more frequency modulated than the disturbance barks,” and play barks are “similar to the isolation barks except that they usually occurred in clusters rather than singly.”

Instead of seeing barks as meaningless noise, pay attention. Banjo might be yipping because he is alone, or he may have noticed that someone uninvited is climbing in through your second-floor window.

Dog barks are full of information, but what about growls? Anna Taylor, now at the Queen’s University (Ontario) Bader International Study Center in England, found that, unlike barks, many acoustic properties of growls in a play and aggressive context are alike. But aggressive growls were longer than play growls, and play growls had a shorter pause between growls. Although growls from different contexts can sound similar to human ears, Tamás Faragó and his colleagues at the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest found that growls carry considerable meaning in dog-dog communication.

In a 2010 study published in Animal Behaviour, dogs were placed in a room with a bone; as they approached the bone, researchers played a recording of one of three different types of growls. Dogs responded to the “this is my food” growl by backing away from the bone and, for the most part, ignored the “go away stranger” and the play growls because those sounds were not relevant to the bone. All growls are not the same, and dogs know it.

Even though not all growls are associated with aggression, an aggressive growl should not be ignored. If you come across a situation where growling could be a sign of aggression, keep your cool, though. Jolanta Benal, author of the 2011 The Dog Trainer’s Guide to a Happy, Well-Behaved Pet (Quick and Dirty Tips), reminds: if you punish a dog for growling, you are essentially punishing it for giving a warning. Growling is a form of communication related to emotional or inner states in a particular context. If you want to decrease it, think about what is prompting it. The growling itself is not a problem.

Credit: Tim Macpherson Getty Images

When We’re Angry, Dogs Get the Feels

Dog lovers may find it obvious that dogs pick up on our emotions. Attending to our emotional expression—in our faces, behavior or even smell—helps them live intimately by our side.

“Dogs get us,” we say. End of story. Yet what about their side of the story? If dogs attend to our emotions—particularly those we wear on our faces—how might dogs feel when they see our different emotions?

An answer to this question arose almost by accident. In 2015 Corsin A. Müller and his colleagues at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, published a study that sought to determine whether dogs can discern happy and angry expressions in human faces, as opposed to relying on other cues (their finding: yes, dogs can get this information from our faces alone).

Because of the study design, the researchers could also peer into how dogs might feel about our emotions. In the study, pet dogs saw images of happy or angry human faces on a computer screen. To get a treat, the dogs had to approach and nose-touch a particular image on the screen. These are dogs. They can do this. Nose-touch for a treat? Yes, please!

But when viewing the angry faces, the researchers noticed something odd. Dog performance was affected by whether they saw happy or angry expressions. During the initial training, dogs seeing the angry expression took longer to learn to approach and nose-touch the image for a treat than did dogs that saw the happy expression. In other words, dogs were less inclined to approach and nose-touch angry faces, even though doing so would yield a treat.

“Why would I approach an angry person? That makes no sense,” a dog might think. Through past experiences with people, dogs could come to view the angry expression as aversive. The researchers suggest that dogs “had to overcome their natural tendency to move away from aversive (or threatening) stimuli.”

Reluctance to approach is only one way to assess how dogs perceive our emotions. To tackle the same question, a study published in January 2018 in Behavioural Processes turned to a subtle and often overlooked behavior that you might spot more often after today.

How do dogs feel when they see our different emotions? Credit: Getty Images

Mouth-licking, the scientists say, “is believed to be an indicator of short-term (or acute) stress responses.” This behavior has been identified in stressful contexts such as when a dog is startled by a loud noise or when a dog is alone and experiencing separation-related issues. In social situations, a quick in/out of the tongue may suggest emotional conflict and could be accompanied by other subtle behaviors that indicate, “Umm… interact? No, I’d rather keep my distance, thanks.” Licking is also commonly found in appeasement or pacifying contexts.

Unlike trembling, whining, excessive barking and panting—which owners more regularly identify as stress-related—people are less likely to identify subtle behaviors such as looking away, turning the head, yawning and lip-licking as possible indicators of dog discomfort.

Now it should make more sense why the researchers looked at dog mouth-licking: “As the mouth-licking behavior was associated with the viewing of negative faces,” they explain, “it is likely that these negative emotional visual stimuli were perceived as aversive by the dogs.”

A canine’s extended tongue should be on dog lovers’ radar. To clarify, we are not talking about just any tongue extension, such as those associated with food, or a happy dog’s lolling tongue, or a tongue engaged in licking someone. Though inconsistently labeled and described in the literature, the tongue extension we are discussing is generally described as an in/out of the tongue that may (or may not) go over the nose. Out in the real world, dogs may display this type of tongue extension in concert with behaviors such as lifting a paw, yawning, turning the head and looking away, being still, moving away or making the body smaller. Seems like we are going to need a bigger radar.

“If a dog starts tongue-flicking and turning his head when I reach to pet him, I’m going to pay a lot of attention to it and probably change my own behavior,” offers Patricia McConnell, a certified applied animal behaviorist.

So dogs do indeed attend to our emotional expression. That is our part of the story. Their part of the story is written in their behavior.

Does Your Pooch Love You?

The answer may surprise you

By Jason G. Goldman

You love your dog. Does your dog love you back? A group of Swedish and Danish researchers went looking for an answer. More specifically, knowing that dogs are highly attuned to cues from humans, the researchers suspected that dogs belonging to owners who felt they had a great relationship with their pets would also perceive that the relationship was close, perhaps because the owners’ attitude would lead to a high frequency of positive interactions between the duo.

Twenty dog-owner pairs participated in the study, which was led by Therese Rehn of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and published in the January 2014 issue of Applied Animal Behaviour Science. The humans all completed a questionnaire called the Monash Dog Owner Relationship Scale (MDORS), which was designed to evaluate the strength of the relationship from the perspective of the owner. The MDORS contains 28 items divided into three subscales. The first subscale assesses the nature of the dog-owner interactions (“How often do you hug your dog?”), the second reflects the emotional closeness that the owner feels toward his or her dog (“I wish my dog and I never had to be apart”), and the third concerns the perceived investment required to care for a dog (“My dog costs too much money”).

The dogs were thrust into a modified version of the Ainsworth “strange situation” procedure, a clever experiment originally designed to measure the strength of human parent-child relationships. It centers on a child—or dog—being left alone with a stranger. The doggy version begins with the owner sitting in a chair ignoring the dog. After a few minutes, a stranger comes into the room and, ignoring the dog, talks to the owner. The stranger attempts to play with the dog, and then the owner quietly leaves the room. The stranger continues to engage the dog in play and then exits, leaving the dog alone. The owner returns, greets the dog and begins ignoring it again. The stranger returns, greets the dog and ignores it as well. Finally, the owner leaves once more.

When conducted with human toddlers, the slightly distressing nature of the strange situation activates an innate, adaptive system that motivates the child to seek comfort from the parent. By carefully observing the children and weighing their comfort-seeking behaviors against their more independent exploration behaviors, researchers can determine whether or not children have secure emotional attachments to their parents. Children who feel more securely attached are more likely to seek closeness with Mom or Dad when stressed but also to play independently once they feel comfortable.

The researchers predicted that canines whose owners perceived their relationship with their pets to be strongest would behave in ways indicative of strong bonding during the test. Instead they found only two significant correlations. When dogs were reunited with their owners after being alone, those whose owners reported having a lot of interactions with the animals sought out such interactions more—which might look like strong attachment but could equally have been a reflection of past rewards for initiating physical contact. And unlike securely attached toddlers, canines of such owners were less likely than others to play independently in the strange situation. In that way, they resembled insecurely attached youngsters. Dogs are not children, though, and did not show the separation anxiety that insecurely attached children display; thus, the latter finding is hard to interpret.

This study marks one of the first attempts to scientifically probe the connection between dogs’ perceptions of their bond with their owners and owners’ perceptions of their bond with their dogs. And here’s the bad news for all those dog lovers who are just certain that Fluffy loves them back: there was no correlation between the “perceived emotional closeness” subscale of the MDORS questionnaire and the dogs’ behavior in the strange situation. The researchers put it bluntly: “There was no evidence to support the view that because a person has a strong emotional bond to their dog, their dog is similarly attached to them.” You cannot simply love a dog so much that it will be forced to love you back.

Jason G. Goldman (@jgold85) is a science journalist based in Los Angeles.

Wanted! Citizen Researchers

Don’t let these projects pass you by

Over the past few years public participation in science projects has surged, and research involving dogs is no exception. Often the work consists of online activities, but sometimes it requires participants to go into the world, do something and report back. Here’s a list of online dog science projects that are active and that, in most cases, anyone in the world can join. —J.H.

Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Attachment Bond between Humans and Pet Dogs

Human-Animal Interaction Lab, Oregon State University

www.thehumananimalbond.com/current-studies/cross-cultural-attachment

Researchers are studying attachment relationships between pet dogs and their owners in different demographic groups.

Dog Personality Survey

Animal Behaviour Cognition and Welfare Group, University of Lincoln, England

http://uoldogtemperament.co.uk/dogpersonality

These projects aim to identify robust personality traits in dogs.

Family Dog Project

Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest

https://familydogproject.elte.hu/participate-in-our-research

Researchers would you like you to report on your dog in one of several different projects:

Breeding environment, genes and behavior
Emotional assessment of dog whines
Separation behavior query
Dogs’ vocalization questionnaire
Dogs’ personality and certain diseases
Jealousy in dogs
Is your dog loud?
Emotional content of sounds

Woof!

Acoustic Engineering, University of Salford, England

www.sound101.org/woof/index.php

This project explores how people respond to dog barks.

Canine Behavior Assessment & Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ)

Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society, University of Pennsylvania

http://vetapps.vet.upenn.edu/cbarq

C-BARQ provides standardized evaluations of canine temperament and behavior.

The Meaning of Belly-Up#

When a Dog Won’t Play#

Is That Really Guilt You See?#

Why Dogs Like People#

Beware the Fear#

What Barks Say#

When We’re Angry, Dogs Get the Feels#

The Meaning of Belly-Up

When a Dog Won’t Play

Is That Really Guilt You See?

Why Dogs Like People

Beware the Fear

What Barks Say

When We’re Angry, Dogs Get the Feels