It's true that our puppers can sense when we're stressed out about something. That makes them stressed out, too. But stress isn't the only emotion that dogs can sense in us. Doggos are very good at reading people's feelings, and even "catch" those feelings for themselves.
Research shows that dogs can differentiate the emotions that we exhibit through our behavior. Whether it's fear, happiness, anger, stress, or joy, your dog can probably tell how you're feeling. Psychologists call it 'emotional contagion'.
As professor of psychology and director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University Clive Wynn explained to National Geographic, "Dogs are amazingly social beings."
But how exactly does that happen? Unfortunately, there's no magical or supernatural connection between a dog and their owner (that would be cool though, huh?). Scientists explain that there are a few physiological factors that allow pooches to pick up on what their owners are feeling.
When a dog and their owner look in each other's eyes, both experience a release in oxytocin, also called 'the love hormone". The same happens when we pet them; that's how bonding between an owner and a pet works. Our pooches also feel 'affective empathy' – when they hear us crying, they become stressed. When we laugh, they get excited.
When we have a conversation with a close friend, we tend to mimic their body language. If they're animated and excited, we sometimes mirror their gestures. If they're sad and crying, we tend to do the same.
Researchers explain that it's our mirror neurons firing up, making us feel like we're experiencing the same emotions. It works the same way with dogs: their bodies get tense when they're angry while we're scolding them, for example.
"Because of our close connection with dogs, we have co-evolved to detect each other's [emotional] signals in ways that are different from other species," associate professor of psychology at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin Julia Meyers-Manor explained to National Geographic.
For many years, researchers believed that dogs have adapted to read human emotions as a survival tactic. When humans domesticated dogs, they supposedly learned to sense what we feel in order to be better cared for. But in 2019, researchers found that this actually depends on the time spent together between the dog and their owner. The longer the two have lived together, the stronger their bond.
A dog's sense of smell is the stuff of legends. Beagles, for example, have about 200 million olfactory receptors. Humans, in comparison, have around five million. In fact, a beagle's sense of smell is so good that they can even detect certain types of cancer (lung caner in particular) with 97% accuracy from blood serum samples.
But dogs in general can sense emotions through the odors humans emit. A 2018 study with Labradors and Golden Retrievers showed that dogs mirror the emotions that odors represent. For example, when exposed to a body odor representing fear, they exhibit more stressful behaviors than when exposed to 'happy' odors.
