If you've ever been a dog owner, you'd know that it can be hard not to anthropomorphize your pet's behavior, when their personalities and emotional states seem so much like ours. A recent study published in Current Biology suggested that the role emotional state pays on decision-making in dogs is very similar to humans. They even did a series of experiments to test whether or not a dog can be an optimist or a pessimist. They performed the experiments on shelter dogs in Britain. First they observed a dog's reaction to being isolated for a period of time to see if it would respond to separation-anxiety. Anxious behaviors included barking, jumping on furniture and scratching the door. Then they placed two food bowls in two rooms, one full and one empty. Once the dogs learned that the bowls were sometimes empty, sometimes full, they began placing the bowls in ambiguous places. Some dogs would race to every bowl, hoping to find food, while others did not. The researchers suggested that the first type of dog had an optimistic outlook, and the second type a pessimistic outlook. They also found that the more separation-anxiety a dog exhibited, the more likely it was to be a pessimistic dog. A pessimistic outlook might not be apparent in other characteristics of the dog, like speed, agility or learning capability. What this study suggests, a dedicated dog person could've told you all along: that dogs have distinct personalities and their mood affects their behavior just like ours.
-Jane de Verges (Group A)
I think my dog is pessimistic! This is an interesting way to think about their behavior. Many people would just assume that their dog is either energized or tired, but thinking of it on another level makes much more sense. Very cool experiment. - Bailey
ReplyDeleteThis is very interesting - as a dog owner, I certainly agree that dogs have very distinct personalities and moods. I don't know if I'm convinced that this study really shows that dogs can be pessimistic or optimistic, especially since you say the dogs used were shelter dogs. Racing to look in every bowl for mood might indicate something like optimism, but couldn't there be other reasons why some dogs didn't go looking in every bowl?
ReplyDeletePosted by Dana Mirsky
Did they look into hormonal levels at all? Where there trends for certain breeds? Are some breeds more optimistic than others?
ReplyDeleteJen Kodela
Very interesting! but I'm not sure shelter dogs were the best subjects to use. It would be better to use dogs that had been reared in similar environments to make a more accurate conclusion about dog personality. Littermates might be a good comparison. Also it would be interesting to compare the personalities of different breeds.
ReplyDelete-Alex Sprague
I agree with Alex that shelters dogs were probably not the best choice, but I understand it is an easily accesible resource. I think that long with littermate, dogs with different histories (abuse, good care etc) would be an interesting variable. For example my dog has a history of abuse and as a result has a very high level of separation anxiety which I think makes him somewhat of a pessimist. Very interesting article!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments.
ReplyDeleteI believe that this test is an interesting look at dog behavior, but I agree that there are too many variables that were unaccounted for. From what I get from the paper, hormones, breed, relatedness, age, sex, neuter status or possible abuse history were all ignored in this test. The purpose of the study was simply to test a correlation between separation-anxiety behavior and optimistic/pessimistic decision making. I agree with you that using littermates or dogs with similar backgrounds might've eliminated some of the possible underlying variables.
I think it is interesting that more anxious dogs showed more "pessimistic" decision making, but I don't know if this test is detailed enough to say if the findings are significant. Also, I don't know if I agree with the categorization of dogs as "optimistic" or "pessimistic" at all-- these terms are defined in human behavior, but what does that mean for dogs exactly?
-Jane de Verges