Your Dog May Look Sad When You Are Happy and Vice Versa — Here’s Why

Dogs may be man’s best friend, but we might not know them as well as we think we do. While we tend to perceive others’ emotions as similar to our own — seeing other people as happy when we are happy, for example — the reverse is true when it comes to our canine pals. Volunteers who were conditioned to feel sad rated dogs as happier. And vice versa.

“People and dogs have been living intimately with each other for at least 14,000 years. And in that time, dogs have learned plenty of things about how to get along with human beings,” co-author Clive Wynne, a professor of psychology and director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, said in a statement. “And yet our research suggests that there are quite big gaps in how we understand what dogs are feeling.”

The study, published in the journal PeerJ, is part of an ongoing project investigating the way human biases influence our understanding of animals’ emotions.

Reading Dogs’ Emotions

images of three different dogs used in the ASU study — From left to right: Canyon, Henry, and Oliver, the three dogs used in this study.
(Image Credit: Arizona State University)

To find out how good the average person is at decoding a dog’s emotions, the team recruited three pups: a 14-year-old mixed-breed named Oliver, a 1-year-old Catahoula dog named Canyon, and a 3-year-old French bulldog named Henry.

Each canine was filmed under three scenarios, carefully designed to provoke either a positive, neutral, or negative reaction. For Oliver, this involved a treat to elicit a positive emotion and a cat to evoke a negative emotion. For Canyon, a toy (positive) and a vacuum cleaner (negative). For Henry, the promise of seeing “Grandma” (positive) and another vacuum cleaner (negative). All three were filmed resting or waiting for their owner to produce a neutral clip.

The clips were then shown to undergraduate volunteers, who were asked to rate how happy or sad or how calm or excited the dogs were feeling. This was after the volunteers had been primed to feel happy, sad, or neutral themselves. Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, altering students' moods did not significantly affect their perception of the dogs’ emotions.

Reading Opposite Emotions

To determine whether or not the results were influenced by the researchers’ choice of priming images, the study’s authors repeated the experiment using priming materials featuring dogs.

“We thought what if we use priming images that were actually dogs — a dog playing in the park, a puppy in a teacup, for example, or a dog that looks sad behind bars or a dog left on the side of the street,” first author Holly Molinaro, president and senior animal welfare scientist at Animal Wellbeing Solutions, said in a statement.

This time, the team did observe a correlation between the volunteers’ mood and the ratings, only not in the way expected. While those in the positive mood group rated the dogs as sadder, those in the negative mood group rated the dogs as happier. A less surprising finding was that watching dog clips improved volunteers' moods.

Trying to Understand Dog Emotions

The team noted that there are some limitations to the study — the experiment used only nine clips of three dogs, for example – but says it exposes potential gaps in our knowledge of dogs and their emotions.

Molinaro and Wynne hope that by improving our understanding of animals’ emotions, we can better care for pets and prevent inappropriate handling.

“In this domain of how people understand dogs' emotions, I'm continuously surprised,” said Wynne. “I feel like we are just scratching at the surface of what is turning out to be quite a big mystery.”

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