Emotional contagion between humans and dogs stems from centuries of selective breeding, suggests comparison with pet pigs
Do you know that Dogs have the innate ability to feel your pain? This is what a study suggests that compared the responses of dogs and pigs to the sound of human crying. The results were published in scientific journal Animal Behavior.
Studies that test whether animals are right react to strange human sounds or are capable of true emotional contagion – the ability to interpret and reflect people’s emotional states – are poor.
However, this experiment, published on July 2, has shown that dogs can mirror the emotions of the people around them.
The question that remains is whether this emotional contagion is rooted in universal emotional vocal signals that can be understood by all pets, or whether it is specific to companion animals, such as dogs.
To test this, the researchers compared the stress responses of pet dogs and pigs to human sounds.
Just like dogs, Pet pigs are social animals raised from a young age among people. But unlike dogs, pigs have been raised as livestock for most of their history.
So, if emotional contagion can be learned simply by being around people, pet pigs should respond similarly to dogs.
How was the study conducted?
The researchers recruited dog or pig owners from around the world to film themselves in a room with their pets while they played recorded sounds of crying or buzzing. They then counted the number of stressful behaviors — such as whining and yawning for dogs and rapid ear movements for pigs — they displayed during the experiment.
As expected, the dogs were “very, very good at picking up the emotional content of our vocalizations,” study co-author Paula Pérez Fraga, an animal behavior researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, told Nature.
Dogs became stressed when they heard crying and were not moved by the sound of the buzzing. However, although pigs experienced some stress when exposed to crying, their behavior suggested that the buzzing was much more stressful.
This may be because pigs do not interpret crying as a negative emotion, says Natalia Albuquerque, a cognitive ethologist at the University of São Paulo, in an interview with Nature.
The hum, however, can be “very strange” for pigs, who “don’t know how to process it.”
Further research
The findings suggest that, compared to livestock, companion animals may have stronger emotional contagion with humans.
But the scientist cautions that more research is needed. “Pigs are very sensitive,” Albuquerque says. “I expected to find that pigs would also show emotional contagion.”
“We’re not saying pigs can’t do it. [contágio emocional]”, she says. “The story is really about how good the dogs were, not how bad the pigs were.”
Source: Terra
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