Dr Deborah Custance and Jennifer Mayer, both from the Department of Psychology, developed an innovative procedure to examine if
domestic dogs could identify and respond to
emotional states in humans.
Eighteen
pet dogs,
spanning a range of ages and breeds, were exposed to four separate
20-second experimental conditions in which either the dog's owner or an
unfamiliar person pretended to cry, hummed in an odd manner, or carried
out a casual conversation.
The dogs demonstrated behaviours consistent with an expression of
empathic concern. Significantly more dogs looked at, approached and
touched the humans as they were crying as opposed to humming, and no
dogs responded during talking. The majority of dogs in the study
responded to the crying person in a submissive manner consistent with
empathic concern and comfort-offering.
"The humming was designed to be a relatively novel behaviour, which
might be likely to pique the dogs' curiosity. The fact that the dogs
differentiated between crying and humming indicates that their response
to crying was not purely driven by
curiosity,"
explained Dr Custance. "Rather, the crying carried greater emotional
meaning for the dogs and provoked a stronger overall response than
either humming or talking."
The study also found that the dogs responded to the person who was
crying regardless of whether it was their owner or the unfamiliar
person: "If the dogs' approaches during the crying condition were
motivated by self-oriented comfort-seeking, they would be more likely to
approach their usual source of comfort, their owner, rather than the
stranger," said Jennifer. "No such preference was found. The
dogs
approached whoever was crying regardless of their identity. Thus they
were responding to the person's emotion, not their own needs, which is
suggestive of empathic-like comfort-offering behaviour."
More information: The full paper has been published by SpringerLink and can be viewed
here. The paper is also available at Goldsmiths Research Online
here.
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