A research group centered around the Department of Animal-Assisted Veterinary Medicine at Azabu University* has revealed that dogs may respond not only to clear emotional expressions from their owners, but also to more subtle combinations of information, such as physiological changes associated with stress and subjective moods.
Dogs read various social information from human facial expressions, voices, and gestures, and change their behavior according to the human's emotional state. In this study, the research group investigated whether dogs utilize subtle information emitted by their owners even when humans are not clearly expressing their emotions.
In the study, owners were asked to experience stressful or relaxed states, and then their facial images, voices, and scents were recorded while they read a set of texts. Multiple stimuli derived from the owners, combining these elements, were presented to the dogs, and their behavioral responses and heart rate variability were measured.
The results showed that when owners were stressed, dogs paid more attention to situations where the owner was physiologically stressed but not subjectively stressed than when the owner was physiologically and subjectively stressed. This suggests that dogs combine the owner's state with various pieces of information emanating from it and adjust their responses accordingly.
Furthermore, while no clear changes were observed in the dogs' own heart rate variability due to conditions or stimuli, examining the relationship between the heart rate variability of the owners and the dogs suggested the possibility of physiological synchronization between the owners and the dogs.
This research is expected to not only deepen mutual understanding between humans and dogs, but also to provide a more accurate understanding of dogs' stress and emotional states, leading to improvements in the well-being and animal welfare of both humans and dogs.
*Other participating institutions include Tohoku University, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Hokkaido University, and Quadritics Inc.
Paper information: [Frontiers in Veterinary Science] Dogs display context-dependent behavioral responses to subtle owner-derived multimodal stimuli
