Jamie Street on Unsplash " />Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever As pet owners, we take having furry companions very seriously. In fact, a Purina survey published last year found that 73% of pet owners consider their pet to be their best friend while 53% see them as their own children. Guilty. Additionally, dogs are the most popular pet in the UK, with data from the PDSA revealing that 30% of UK adults have a dog – an estimated population of 11.1 million pet dogs. So, you’d think with all of this in mind, we would be able to read dogs pretty well, right? Tail wagging = happy, lying down looking glum = sad. Easy! Well, it turns out, not so much. We are actually quite bad at figuring out how dogs feel In a new study, researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) found that how we read our dogs’ emotions actually depends on our own moods. Wild. The researchers found that when people are in a good mood, they are more likely to think a dog is sad and yes, you guessed it, when they’re in a bad mood, they tend to think the same dog looks happy. “In this domain of how people understand dog’s emotions, I’m continuously surprised,” said study co-author Clive Wynne, a professor of psychology and director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at ASU. “I feel like we are just scratching at the surface of what is turning out to be quite a big mystery.” Dogs were actually recruited for the study To help with the work, the researchers hired Oliver, a 14-year-old mixed-breed; Canyon, a 1-year-old Catahoula dog; and Henry, a 3-year-old French bulldog. The researchers then asked the dogs’ owners to prompt their pets with emotional cues. ‘Positive prompts’ involved a treat for Oliver, a toy for Canyon and Henry only had to hear that he was going to see his ‘Grandma’. D’awww. Then, to kill their moods, Oliver was shown a cat while just seeing a vacuum was enough to lower the moods of Canyon and Henry. Finally, neutral-mood videos showed the dogs resting or waiting for their owner to present another prompt. The researchers edited the video clips so that only the dog was visible on a black background. When these videos were shown to humans, the results were surprising The researchers ran two experiments; first, they worked with 300 undergraduate students to view images from a standardised set used by psychologists to invoke positive, neutral or negative moods. Then, the participants were asked to watch short clips of the trio of dogs and rate how happy or sad each dog looked, and how calm or excited they seemed. While the priming successfully shifted people’s moods, it did not affect how people rated the emotional state of dogs. “It just didn’t work the way that it does when you do this with humans,” Wynne said. So, the researchers did a second experiment to see if the priming didn’t work as expected because it largely involved photos of people. “We thought what if we use priming images that were actually dogs — a dog playing in the park, a puppy in a teacup, for example, or a dog that looks sad behind bars or a dog left on the side of the street,” Molinaro said. They recruited another 300 undergraduates to repeat the experiment with dog-only images used to prime their mood. “This time what we found was an effect, but in the opposite direction,” she said. “All those that saw the happy dog images rated the dogs as more sad. And all those who saw the sad dog images rated the dogs in the videos as happier.” The researchers also note that merely watching the videos of dogs against a black background — even dogs shown in a negative mood — lifted the emotional state of study participants. Understandable. We still have so much to learn about dogs “People and dogs have been living intimately with each other for at least 14,000 years. And in that time, dogs have learned plenty of things about how to get along with human beings,” Wynne said. “And yet our research suggests that there are quite big gaps in how we understand what dogs are feeling.” Molinaro and Wynne believe their research can improve human-animal interaction and support more accurate, empathetic and welfare-conscious care. Related... Meet The Team Builders Helping Dogs In Need Get Wheelchairs Study Names Dogs With The Most (And Least) Wolf DNA The Cute Reason Dogs Love Digging In The Bin (And How To Stop It)