You come home from work, a little exhausted, you scroll through dog videos on your phone. Some bark at a vacuum cleaner, others sleep in a ball. You’re already feeling a little better, and looking at your own dog, you’re sure you see exactly what he’s feeling.
A series of experiments conducted at Arizona State University shows that this feeling of understanding everything is more fragile than we think. Our mood, especially when it is fueled by other images of dogs, can twist our outlook to the point of making us see the opposite of the animal’s real emotion. Intriguing, and quite confusing.
When human humor is not enough to deceive the eye
Psychologists have long spoken of the “emotional congruence effect”: a person in a good mood perceives the world more positively, a gloomy person sees more of the negative. The article published in the journal PeerJ also recalls the difference between mood and emotion: mood lasts longer and is not linked to a specific event, while emotion is brief and triggered by a stimulus. The team of Holly G. Molinaro and Clive DL Wynne wanted to know if this classic effect also applied to how to understand your dog’s emotions.
In a first experiment, nearly 300 students saw positive, neutral or negative photos of people, landscapes and objects, from the Nencki database, before watching nine videos of three dogs, Oliver, Canyon and Henry. The images did indeed change the participants’ stated mood. But their ratings of valence (how good or bad the dog seemed) and activation (calm or agitated) barely varied between groups. Dogs filmed in a positive situation (treat, toy), neutral or facing a cat or a vacuum cleaner were judged in the same way, and watching these videos even improved the final mood of most of the students.
When other dogs bias our reading… backwards
The surprise came from a second experience described by the site StudyFinds. Same principle, but this time the images showed only dogs: some happy and playful, others injured or frightened. Again, the photos put the participants in a good or bad mood. In contrast, those who had seen happy dogs later rated the dogs in the videos as feeling worse, while those who had seen distressed dogs rated them more positive. Researchers speak of a “contrast effect”: judgment moves in the opposite direction to the induced mood.
Important detail, this contrast only appears when the mood is provoked by other dogs, and not by landscapes or human faces. The authors suggest that comparison processes are triggered: after very harsh images, a dog who is merely a little worried may seem “pretty good”, and after a parade of beaming puppies, an ordinary dog seems almost sad. These results are consistent with another study from the same program already showing that the perception of a dog’s emotions often depends more on the context than on the animal’s actual behavior.
Better understand your dog’s daily emotions
For owners and professionals (shelters, educators, veterinarians), these biases have concrete consequences. Someone who comes away from a stream of videos of ideally happy dogs may find their own animal “less happy” than it is, and a shelter volunteer, saturated with images of abuse, risks, on the contrary, underestimating the distress of a dog who is doing “better than the others”. Becoming aware of this emotional filter then becomes one more step in truly understanding what the animal is feeling.
To limit these pitfalls, a few reflexes can help:
- Take a break before interpreting, especially after watching a lot of dog content online;
- Focus on concrete signals from the dog: general posture, position of the tail, body tension, shifty or insistent glances, vocalizations;
- Take into account his personality and his history, instead of comparing him to dogs seen in videos;
- In a professional context, multiply opinions and cross-reference observations rather than relying on a single impression, potentially colored by your own emotional state.