A new study shows most of us, including dog owners, don’t perceive dogs’ emotions accurately, if at all. Researchers presented people with videos of a dog reacting to positive and negative stimuli. When asked their opinions of the dog’s emotions, participants paid more attention to situational cues than the dog’s behavior.
Source: The New York Times, March 10, 2025. Link. She was inspired by studies that explore how context clues affect people’s perceptions of others’ emotions. She was also inspired by a distinctly pandemic-era technology: Zoom. The video conferencing software has a feature that blurs out workers’ backgrounds. Ms Molinaro and her adviser, Clive Wynne — a canine-behavior expert at Arizona State — began to wonder if they could do something similar, creating videos that allowed people to see a dog’s behavior without seeing what was unfolding around it.
Source: Anthrozoös, March 10, 2025. Link. A dog was video recorded in putatively positive or negative situations. In experiment 1, participants were shown videos with and without visual background (context). In experiment 2, videos were edited so the dog appeared in mismatched contexts. In both experiments, undergraduates (n = 383, 485) rated the videos for valence and arousal, and freely described the dog’s emotions.
When it comes to just perceiving dog emotions, we think we know what’s happening, but we’re subconsciously relying on a lot of other factors.” Holly Molinaro, doctoral student at Arizona State University and the first author of the paper
Photo. M. Scott Brauer, The New York Times