Dog emotions not well understood by humans
While we may think we understand dog emotions, a study from Arizona State University has suggested otherwise. The research has revealed that we often do not understand the true meaning and intention of a pet’s feelings and can misread them. The reason is that we are often projecting human emotions onto our pets.
The paper is aptly titled “Barking up the wrong tree: Human perceptions of dog emotions is influenced by extraneous factors.” ASU researchers Holly Molinaro and Clive Wynne reveal experiments they ran to examine how humans understand dog emotions. The research shows that humans typically have a poor understanding of dog’s emotional state because they judge it according to the context of the events they witness.
Molinaro and Wynne’s research is published in the journal Anthrozoos.
“People do not look at what the dog is doing, instead they look at the situation surrounding the dog and base their emotional perception off of that,”
said Molinaro, an ASU Ph.D. student in psychology and animal welfare scientist.
“Our dogs are trying to communicate with us, but we humans seem determined to look at everything except the poor pooch himself.” added Wynne, an ASU psychology professor who studies dog behaviour and the human-dog bond.
People tend to project human feelings onto dogs, resulting in them “anthropomorphizing” the interaction, further clouding the true meaning of their emotional state and misunderstanding what they actually want to tell you.
“The first step is just to be aware that we are not that good at reading dogs’ emotions,” Molinaro said. “We need to be humbler in our understanding of our dogs. Once we can start from a basis of understanding our biases, we can begin to look at our pups in a new light.”
“Every dog’s personality, and thus her emotional expressions, are unique to that dog,” she explains. “Really pay attention to your own dog’s cues and behaviours.”
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