Dogs really can smell your fear, and then they get scared too
Dog owners swear that their furry best friend is in tune with their emotions. Now it seems this feeling of interspecies connection is real: dogs can smell your emotional state, and adopt your emotions as their own. Science had already shown that dogs can see and hear the signs of human emotions, says Biagio D’Aniello of the University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy. But nobody had studied whether dogs could pick up on olfactory cues from humans....D’Aniello and his colleagues tested whether dogs could sniff out human emotions by smell alone. First, human volunteers watched videos designed to cause fear or happiness, or a neutral response, and the team collected samples of their sweat. Next, the researchers presented these odour samples to domestic dogs, and monitored the dogs’ behaviours and heart rates. Dogs exposed to fear smells showed more signs of stress than those exposed to happy or neutral smells. They also had higher heart rates, and sought more reassurance from their owners and made less social contact with strangers....D’Aniello’s study suggests humans can inadvertently hijack their dogs’ emotions by releasing smells. A second study suggests dogs can return the favour, using their expressive faces. Juliane Kaminski of the University of Portsmouth, UK, and her colleagues have found that dogs’ faces are most expressive when they know people are looking at them. The researchers introduced dogs to a human who was either looking at them or facing away, and either presenting food or offering nothing. The team analysed how much the dogs’ facial movements varied in the four scenarios. They found that the dogs’ facial expressions varied the most when the person was looking at them. In contrast, Kaminski says there was no sign of a “dinner table effect”, “which would predict that dogs try and look super-cute when they want something from the humans.”
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2150956-dogs-really-can-smell-your-fear-and-then-they-get-scared-too/
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I wish people didn't have to fear. I am not sure about my fears, but they may be different from what most people fear. I fear things like misunderstandings in society, especially ideologies - as a phenomenon - not any particular ideology. I also fear the fear itself and hatred, again as phenomena, negative emotions that control people. And this makes me think how do these fears control my own behavior? For example I write because of these fears. Because the wrong kind of ideologies are spreading, making us act stupid.
ReplyDeleteI fear people will stop talking and start acting to remove what they perceive as problems rather than addressing the problem.
ReplyDeleteRelating back to dogs - people like to ban breeds even though the problem is that some people who get those breeds emphasis aggressive behaviour while socializing them.