Monday, March 10, 2025

Research shows humans have a long way to go in understanding a dog’s emotions

Arizona State University

dog experiment — video:
New research from Arizona State University shows that people use contextual visual clues to determine a dog’s emotions, as exemplified in this short video, rather than focusing on the dog itself.
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Credit: Arizona State University

Tempe, Ariz., March 10, 2025 – Life with a dog is a matter of give and take. Especially when it comes to communication. With no common human-dog language, our ability to communicate relies on understanding and reading our pet, and vice versa. That process can seem seamless. You give your dog a treat, you look into her eyes and she says “I am delighted to have that cookie.” With a slight wag of her tail, she accepts the treat and romps off to another room to enjoy it. You feel connected to your dog.

At least, that’s what you think.

New research from Arizona State University has revealed that people often do not perceive the true meaning of their pet’s emotions and can misread their dog. The reasons for this are many and include a human misunderstanding of dog expressions due to a bias towards projecting human emotions onto our pets.

In a new paper, “Barking up the wrong tree: Human perceptions of dog emotions is influenced by extraneous factors,” ASU researchers Holly Molinaro and Clive Wynne outline a pair of experiments they ran to show how humans misperceive dog emotions. Their research shows that humans typically do not have a good understanding of the emotional state of their dog because they judge the dog’s emotions according to the context of the event they witness.

“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 behavior and the human-dog bond.

Adding to the misunderstanding is a human projection of their feelings onto the dog. This “anthropomorphizing” of the interaction further clouds truly understanding what your dog’s emotional state actually may be, what she is trying to tell you.

In two experiments, Molinaro and Wynne investigated human perception of dog emotions. They video recorded a dog in what they believed were positive (happy-making) or negative (less happy) situations.

The happy situations were things like offering the leash or a treat, and the unhappy scenarios included gentle chastisement, or bringing out the dreaded vacuum cleaner. Then, in one experiment they showed ordinary members of the public these videos with and without their visual background. In the second experiment they edited the videos so the dog who had been filmed in a happy context looked like he had been recorded in an unhappy situation, and the dog who had been filmed in an unhappy situation looked like he was in a happy one. In both experiments, people rated how happy and excited they thought the dogs were. Sample size for the first experiment was 383 and for the second experiment was 485.

What the researchers found was that people’s perception of the dog’s mood was based on everything in the videos besides the dog himself.

“People do not look at what the dog is doing, instead, they look at the situation surrounding the dog and base their emotional perception on that,” Molinaro said. “You see a dog getting a treat, you assume he must be feeling good. You see a dog getting yelled at, you assume he’s feeling bad. These assumptions of how you think the dog is feeling have nothing to do with the dog’s behavior or emotional cues, which is very striking.”

“In our study, when people saw a video of a dog apparently reacting to a vacuum cleaner, everyone said the dog was feeling bad and agitated,” she continued. “But when they saw a video of the dog doing the exact same thing, but this time appearing to react to seeing his leash, everyone reported that the dog was feeling happy and calm. People were not judging a dog’s emotions based on the dog’s behavior, but on the situation the dog was in.”

Further complicating the communication process is people’s projection of their emotions onto the dog. Molinaro explained that while humans and dogs have shared a bond over the centuries, that doesn’t mean their emotional processing, or even emotional expressions, are the same.

“I have always found this idea that dogs and humans must have the same emotions to be very biased and without any real scientific proof to back it up, so I wanted to see if there are factors that might actually be affecting our perception of dog emotions,” Molinaro said. “If there were, if we as humans focused on other aspects not relating to the dog to deduce their emotional state, then as both scientists and pet owners, we really have to go back to the drawing board.”

Molinaro explained that even in studies of human perception of human emotions it is clear that there is more to reading emotion than just looking at a person’s face. Culture, mood, situational context, even a previous facial expression can influence how people perceive emotions. Yet when it comes to animal emotions, no one has yet studied if those same factors affect us in the same way.

“Our research here shows that for one of those factors, the situational context, it does.”

So how does a good dog owner cut through the biases and misreadings to understand their pets true emotional state?

“The first step is just to be aware that we are not that good at reading dogs’ emotions,” she 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,” Molinaro explains. “Really pay attention to your own dog’s cues and behaviors.”

“When you yell at your dog for doing something bad and she makes that guilty face, is it really because she is guilty, or is it because she is scared you are going to reprimand her more? Taking an extra second or two to focus on your dog’s behaviors, knowing that you need to overcome a bias to view the situation around the dog rather than the dog himself, can go a long way in getting a true read on your own dog’s emotional state, leading to a stronger bond between the two of you.”

Molinaro and Wynne’s research is published in the journal Anthrozoos.

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Journal

Anthrozoös

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Barking up the wrong tree: Human perceptions of dog emotions is influenced by extraneous factors,

Article Publication Date

10-Mar-2025

Discovery: The great whale pee funnel

Whales move nutrients thousands of miles—in their urine—from as far as Alaska to Hawaii, supporting health of tropical ecosystems and fish

University of Vermont

Humpback whale urinating underwater — video:
Footage by Lars Bejder shows a humpback whale urinating underway near Hawaii.
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Credit: Lars Bejder, NOAA permit 21476

Whales are not just big, they’re a big deal for healthy oceans. When they poop, whales move tons of nutrients from deep water to the surface. Now new research shows that whales also move tons of nutrients thousands of miles—in their urine.

In 2010, scientists revealed that whales, feeding at depth and pooping at the surface, provide a critical resource for plankton growth and ocean productivity. Today, a new University of Vermont-led study shows that whales also carry huge quantities of nutrients horizontally, across whole ocean basins, from rich, cold waters where they feed to warm shores near the equator where they mate and give birth. Much of this is in the form of urine—though sloughed skin, carcasses, calf feces, and placentas also contribute.

“These coastal areas often have clear waters, a sign of low nitrogen, and many have coral reef ecosystems,” says Joe Roman, a biologist at the University of Vermont, who co-led the new research. “The movement of nitrogen and other nutrients can be important to the growth of phytoplankton, or microscopic algae, and provide food for sharks and other fish and many invertebrates.”

The study, published March 10 in the journal Nature Communications, calculates that in oceans across the globe, great whales—including right whales, gray whales, and humpbacks—transport about 4000 tons of nitrogen each year to low-nutrient coastal areas in the tropics and subtropics. They also bring more than 45,000 tons of biomass. And before the era of human whaling decimated populations, these long-distance inputs may have been three or more times larger.

A giant conveyor belt

For example, thousands of humpback whales travel from a vast area where they feed in the Gulf of Alaska to a more restricted area in Hawaii, where they breed. There, in the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, the input of nutrients—tons of pee, skin, dead bodies and poop—from whales roughly double what is transported by local physical forces, the team of scientists estimate.

“We call it the ‘great whale conveyor belt,”” Roman says, “or it can also be thought of as a funnel because whales feed over large areas, but they need to be in a relatively confined space to find a mate, breed, and give birth. At first, the calves don't have the energy to travel long distances like the moms can.” Plus, the whales probably stay in shallow, sandy waters because it muffles their sounds. “Moms and newborns are calling all the time, staying in communication,” says Roman, a conservation researcher in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and fellow in UVM's Gund Institute for Environment “and they don’t want predators, like killer whales, or breeding humpback males, to pick up on that.”

Which means that nutrients spread out over the vast ocean get concentrated in much smaller coastal and coral ecosystems, “like collecting leaves to make compost for your garden,” Roman says.

In the summer, adult whales feed at high latitudes (like Alaska, Iceland, and Antarctica), putting on tons of fat, chowing down on krill and herring. According to recent research, North Pacific humpback whales gain about 30 pounds per day in the spring, summer, and fall. They need this energy for an amazing journey: baleen whales migrate thousands of miles to their winter breeding grounds in the tropics—without eating. For example, gray whales travel nearly 7000 miles between feeding grounds off Russia and breeding areas along Baja California. And humpback whales in the Southern Hemisphere migrate more than 5000 miles from foraging areas near Antarctica to mating sites off Costa Rica, where they burn off about 200 pounds each day, while urinating vast amounts of nitrogen-rich urea. (One study in Iceland suggests that fin whales produce more than 250 gallons of urine per day when they are feeding. Humans pee less than half a gallon daily.)

Whales undertake the longest migration of any mammal in the world. And whales are gigantic. “Because of their size, whales are able to do things that no other animal does. They're living life on a different scale,” says Andrew Pershing, one of ten co-authors on the new study and an oceanographer at the nonprofit organization, Climate Central. “Nutrients are coming in from outside—and not from a river, but by these migrating animals. It’s super-cool, and changes how we think about ecosystems in the ocean. We don't think of animals other than humans having an impact on a planetary scale, but the whales really do.”

Out of the blues

Before industrial whaling began in the nineteenth century, the nutrient inputs would have “been much bigger and this effect would've been much bigger,” says Pershing. Plus, the nutrient inputs of blue whales—the largest animals to ever live on the Earth—are not known and were not included in the primary calculations of the new study. In the Southern Ocean, blue whale populations are still greatly reduced after intense hunting in the twentieth century. “There's basic things that we don't know about them, like where their breeding areas are,’’ said Pershing, “so that's an effect that's harder for us to capture.” Both blue whales and humpbacks were depleted from hunting, but some humpback and other whale populations are rebounding after several decades of concerted conservation efforts.

“Lots of people think of plants as the lungs of the planet, taking in carbon dioxide, and expelling oxygen,” says Joe Roman, “For their part, animals play an important role in moving nutrients. Seabirds transport nitrogen and phosphorus from the ocean to the land in their poop, increasing the density of plants on islands. Animals form the circulatory system of the planet—and whales are the extreme example.”

Many whales travel thousands of miles from their summer foraging areas to winter grounds for breeding and calving. Nitrogen and other elements can be released in the form of urine, carcasses, placentas, sloughing skin, and feces (primarily from nursing calves). Humpback whales of the Central North Pacific, shown here, primarily feed off the coast of Alaska and spend winters in the shallow waters of the Hawaiian archipelago. (Illustration by A. Boersma; text adapted from original study in Nature Communications).

Credit

Illustration by A. Boersma