Human Stress May Make Dogs More Pessimistic
Our moods often affect those around us. If someone around you is feeling sad or angry, for example, it may affect your mood negatively.
And according to a new study, our moods may affect our dogs too.
Previous studies have suggested that dogs can smell stress in humans. And now researchers at the University of Bristol in the UK have found that our stress may cause dogs to be more pessimistic.
Dogs were trained to recognize that a bowl placed in one location had food in it, and one placed in a different location was empty. Of course, the dogs quickly learned to go straight to the bowl that always had food in it!
But the researchers then placed new bowls in different locations between the original two, and tested how quickly the dogs went to these bowls.
According to the researchers, the more quickly the dogs went to each new bowl, the more optimistic they were that there was food inside.
The tests were then repeated with different human smells — each dog was exposed to either no smell, or samples of human breath or sweat.
The samples were taken from people who were either listening to relaxing sounds, or doing a math test, making them more likely to be stressed.
The "stressed" smells made the dogs slower to move toward the new bowl closest to the original empty one. This didn't happen when the dogs were exposed to "relaxed" smells.
According to the researchers, this could mean the dogs felt more pessimistic when they smelled stress, since their slow movement suggested that they were less likely to expect to find food inside the bowl.
Researcher Nicola Rooney said it's important to understand how human stress affects dogs in different situations — and to understand that our stress can even "travel through the air."
