Think You Understand Your Dog? Think Again.

People interpret a dog’s emotions based on its situation and have “a big blind spot” for the actual animal, a new study found.

Dogs can’t talk, but their body language speaks volumes. Many dogs will bow when they want to play, for instance, or lick their lips and avert their gaze when nervous or afraid.

But people aren’t always good at interpreting such cues — or even noticing them, a new study suggests.

In the study, the researchers presented people with videos of a dog reacting to positive and negative stimuli, including a leash, a treat, a vacuum cleaner and a scolding. When asked to assess the dog’s emotions, viewers seemed to pay more attention to the situational cues than the dog’s actual behavior, even when the videos had been edited to be deliberately misleading. (In one video, for instance, a dog that appeared to be reacting to the sight of his leash had actually been shown a vacuum cleaner by his owner.)

“When it comes to just perceiving dog emotions, we think we know what’s happening, but we’re actually subconsciously relying on a lot of other factors,” said Holly Molinaro, who is a doctoral student at Arizona State University and the first author of the new paper, which was published on Monday in the journal Anthrozoös.

That bias could mislead owners about their dogs’ well-being, Ms. Molinaro said. People who want to be attentive to their dog’s experiences and emotions need to “take a second or two to actually focus on the dog rather than everything else that’s going on,” she said.

The idea for the study was born in 2021, when Ms. Molinaro was just beginning her doctoral work in canine emotions but the Covid-19 pandemic had sharply limited her ability to do in-person research.