Optimism Index in Dogs

Photo Credit: © B.Stefanov / Fotolia

Dogs generally seem to be cheerful, happy-go-lucky characters, so you might expect that most would have an optimistic outlook on life.

In fact some dogs are distinctly more pessimistic than others, research from the University of Sydney shows.

"This research is exciting because it measures positive and negative emotional states in dogs objectively and non-invasively. It offers researchers and dog owners an insight into the outlook of dogs and how that changes," said Dr Melissa Starling, from the Faculty of Veterinary Science. Her PhD research findings are published in PLOS One today.

"Finding out as accurately as possible whether a particular dog is optimistic or pessimistic is particularly helpful in the context of working and service dogs and has important implications for animal welfare."

Dogs were taught to associate two different sounds (two octaves apart) with whether they would get the preferred reward of milk or instead get the same amount of water. Once the dogs have learnt the discrimination task, they are presented with 'ambiguous' tones.

If dogs respond after ambiguous tones, it shows that they expect good things will happen to them, and they are called optimistic. They can show how optimistic they are by which tones they respond to. A very optimistic dog may even respond to tones that sound more like those played before water is offered.

"Of the dogs we tested we found more were optimistic than pessimistic but it is too early to say if that is true of the general dog population," said Dr Starling.

However it does mean that both individuals and institutions (kennels, dog minders) can have a much more accurate insight into the emotional make-up of their dogs.

According to the research a dog with an optimistic personality expects more good things to happen, and less bad things. She will take risks and gain access to rewards. She is a dog that picks herself up when things don't go her way, and tries again. Minor setbacks don't bother her.

If your dog has a pessimistic personality, he expects less good things to happen and more bad things. This may make him cautious and risk averse. He may readily give up when things don't go his way, because minor setbacks distress him. He may not be unhappy per se, but he is likely to be most content with the status quo and need some encouragement to try new things.

"Pessimistic dogs appeared to be much more stressed by failing a task than optimistic dogs. They would whine and pace and avoid repeating the task while the optimistic dogs would appear unfazed and continue," said Dr Starling.

"This research could help working dog trainers select dogs best suited to working roles. If we knew how optimistic or pessimistic the best candidates for a working role are, we could test dogs' optimism early and identify good candidates for training for that role. A pessimistic dog that avoids risks would be better as a guide dog while an optimistic, persistent dog would be more suited to detecting drugs or explosives."

Dr Starling has been working with Assistance Dogs Australia, a charity organisation that provides service and companion dogs to people with disabilities, to investigate whether an optimism measure could aid in selecting suitable candidates for training.

The research not only suggests how personality may affect the way dogs see the world and how they behave but how positive or negative their current mood is.

"This research has the potential to completely remodel how animal welfare is assessed. If we know how optimistic or pessimistic an animal usually is, it's possible to track changes in that optimism that will indicate when it is in a more positive or negative emotional state than usual," said Dr Starling.
"The remarkable power of this is the opportunity to essentially ask a dog 'How are you feeling?' and get an answer. It could be used to monitor their welfare in any environment, to assess how effective enrichment activities might be in

Citation
Starling MJ,  Branson N, Cody D, Starling TR, McGreevy PD. 2014. Canine Sense and Sensibility: Tipping Points and Response Latency Variability as an Optimism Index in a Canine Judgement Bias Assessment. PLoS ONE, 2014; 9 (9): e107794 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0107794

Dogs Jealous?

Jealousy is usually thought of as being unique to humans, in part because of the complex cognitions often involved in this emotion. However, from a functional perspective, one might expect that an emotion that evolved to protect social bonds from interlopers might exist in other social species, particularly one as cognitively sophisticated as the dog.

Harris and Prouvost (2014) experimented using a paradigm from human infant studies to examine jealousy in domestic dogs. They found that dogs exhibited significantly more jealous behaviors (such as snapping, getting between the owner and object, pushing/touching the object/owner) when their owners displayed affectionate behaviors towards what appeared to be another dog as compared to nonsocial objects.

When their owners showed affection toward a stuffed dog, the real puppies in the study responded by snapping or pushing the stuffed dog aside. This jealous streak only surfaced when owners were attending to the stuffed dog and not when they were occupied with random objects. However, this was no ordinary stuffed dog: It was engineered to bark, whine and wag its tail convincingly.

Since jealously is generally believed to be an emotion that requires more complex thinking, the researchers suggested there could be a more basic form of jealousy specific to dogs and some other social animals that helps protect their bonds and ward off outsiders.

"Many people have assumed that jealousy is a social construction of human beings -- or that it's an emotion specifically tied to sexual and romantic relationships," study co-author Christine Harris, a psychology professor at UCSD, said in a university news release. "Our results challenge these ideas, showing that animals besides ourselves display strong distress whenever a rival usurps a loved one's affection."

As for whether the puppies in the study viewed the stuffed dog as an actual rival, the researchers pointed to this result as evidence that they did: 86 percent of the puppies sniffed the stuffed dog's rear end.

The study, published July 23 in the journal PLOS ONE, involved 36 puppies. Each dog was just 6 months old. All of the puppies were tested separately and videotaped.

During the test, owners were told to ignore their dog and turn their attention to three different objects. First, the owners attended to the realistic-looking stuffed dog. Then they focused on a pail. The third object in the test was a book.

In observing the dogs' behavior, the researchers looked for signs of aggression, attention-seeking and interest in their owner or the objects. The test was designed to help the researchers determine if the dogs felt an emotion similar to jealousy, or if they were just generally annoyed when they lost their owners' attention.

The dogs demonstrated more jealous behaviors when their owner focused on the stuffed dog than when their owner paid attention to the other objects, the study found. These behaviors included trying to come between their owner and the stuffed dog, pushing their owner and snapping when the owners displayed affection toward the stuffed dog.

The researchers concluded a form of primitive jealousy that exists in babies may also exist in at least one other social animal: dogs. This emotion, the study's authors suggested, may have evolved to help infants compete for resources from their parents, including food, attention, love and care.

Citation

Harris CR, Prouvost C (2014) Jealousy in Dogs. PLoS ONE 9(7): e94597. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094597

Dogs are scavengers first

Much of what has been written about dogs is undoubtedly nonsense. And, we will leave the critique of popular TV dog shows for the future. While dogs and wolves undoubtedly shared a common ancestor, it seems improbable that dogs were originally modified from wolves by artificial selection by humans. After all, abandoned dogs do not revert to being wolves, they become just feral dogs. Have humans selected dogs for various traits (color, body size, temperament, etc.) in recent times – undoubtedly they have. But, humans probably had little to do with getting a population of wolves to evolve into the dog. The animal that is generally considered the oldest domesticated species.

A free-ranging dog scavenging leatherback sea turtle nests

on Grande Riviere Beach on the north coast of Trinidad. Note

the large number of black vultures also present. JCM

In chapter 10 of the recently published book, Domestic Dog Cognition and Behavior, titled “A Dog’s-Eye View of Canine Cognition” by Udell, Lord, Feuerbacher and Wynne the authors suggest the following.

Most dogs are scavengers and live on the periphery of human society. These dogs are more likely to avoid human contact than seek it. While pet dogs have been a major focus of recent research is unlikely that the human-dog bond is a special adaptation that is the result of co-evolution, but rather the bond is the expression of basic processes such as conditioning, socialization and biological traits that are shared by domestic and wild canids. Individual dogs that have been socialized to humans and become dependent on them have high levels of sensitivity to human actions. Udell and colleagues argue that the fundamental differences between dog and wolf behavior lie at more basic levels: in the processes of socialization, foraging, and reproduction. Small but crucial intertwined changes in the ancestral dog population led dogs to (1) become more promiscuous than any other canid, (2) be able to reproduce more rapidly than wolves, (3) be a much less effective hunter but (4) dogs are more efficient scavenger than other canids. The authors view the indirect consequences of these changes as producing dogs, and suggest that while “…it may be a little less flattering to the human species, we believe this perspective on dogs is at least as fascinating and closer to the historical truth than the story that humans created dogs.”

Citation

Udell, M. A., Lord, K., Feuerbacher, E. N., & Wynne, C. D. (2014). A Dog’s-Eye View of Canine Cognition. In Domestic Dog Cognition and Behavior (pp. 221-240). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. A pdf of this chapter can be found on-line.