You are probably projecting your own feelings onto your pooch
By Arizona State University
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Or at least, that’s what you believe.
New research from Arizona State University suggests that
people often misinterpret their dog’s emotions. One key reason? Humans tend to
project their own feelings onto their pets rather than accurately reading
canine expressions.
How Context Clouds Canine Emotions
In their study, “Barking up the wrong tree: Human perceptions
of dog emotions is influenced by extraneous factors,” ASU researchers Holly
Molinaro and Clive Wynne conducted experiments to examine how people perceive
dog emotions. Their findings indicate that most humans don’t assess a dog’s
emotional state based on the dog’s behavior alone. Instead, they rely on the
context of the situation to make assumptions.
“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.
The Experiment: Testing Human Perception
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.
Surprising Findings: People Ignore the Dog!
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.”
The Problem of Projection: Human Bias in Action
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.”
The Science Behind Emotional Perception
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.”
How to Truly Understand Your Dog
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.”
Building a Stronger Bond with Your Dog
“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.
Reference: “Barking up the wrong tree: Human perceptions of
dog emotions is influenced by extraneous factors” 10 March 2025, Anthrozoös.
DOI: 10.1080/08927936.2025.2469400
