Can researchers determine the emotions of a pet? A team of cognitive neuroscience and animal behavior scientists, along with cat and dog owners, observe a wide spectrum of emotional states in companion animals, ranging from simple feelings to more complex experiences across multiple categories.
It is noted that understanding how cats and dogs feel is challenging and misinterpretations can lead to welfare issues for animals and potential risks for people. This sentiment opens the study on owners beliefs about the emotional capacities of their cats and dogs published in Animals.
Scientific study of pet emotions remains in early stages. Because owners spend extensive time with their pets, they can be valuable sources of insight today.
In a survey, 438 owners reported on whether their dogs and cats could express emotions and described the behavioral cues they used to identify those states. The questionnaire covered twenty-two different emotional conditions.
Owners generally believed dogs express a wider range of emotions than cats and rely on distinct behavioral cues to recognize emotions in both species.
The number of reported canine emotions tended to rise with owner experience, while it sometimes declined when the owner was a professional in the field.
These owner perceptions offer a useful starting point for advancing research in animal emotions and for validating each emotion within these species.
Jealousy, love, pride, grief…
The survey included six simple emotions and sixteen more complex ones. The simple group encompassed anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise, while the complex set included fun, anxiety, boredom, confusion, curiosity, disappointment, shame, empathy, bereavement, guilt, jealousy, love, positive anticipation, and pride.
Findings show that owners point to a broader catalog of emotions than previously documented, and households with both cats and dogs tended to report higher frequencies of secondary emotions in dogs.
As animal-assisted therapies gain traction for promoting mental health and well-being in humans, accurately identifying an animal’s emotional state becomes key to successful human-animal interactions, notes Hannah McGowan, head of communications at Lincoln University.
Assessing owners’ impressions of pet emotions is viewed as a crucial component of understanding human-animal interactions, says Daniel Mills, MD, professor of veterinary behavioral medicine at Lincoln.
Misinterpretations by owners can skew perceptions of an animal’s emotional state. For example, attributing guilt to a pet based on facial expressions after mischief may lead to unnecessary scolding and may not reflect the animal’s inner feelings.
The humanization problem
Researchers acknowledge that capturing animal emotions is at the edge of current knowledge. Since animals cannot speak, documenting owner impressions becomes a first step toward clearer insight into the inner experiences of companion animals. Kun Guo, a cognitive neuroscience professor at Lincoln, emphasizes this point.
Although owners often report similar cues for dogs and cats when expressing the same emotion, different combinations of cues can signal the same feeling across species. The number of reported emotions in cats tended to be higher in homes with only cats than in homes with dogs.
While owner interpretations provide valuable data, there are notable limitations, including anthropomorphism and humanizing tendencies among dog owners.
Our research indicates that cats and dogs are perceived differently when it comes to emotions, suggesting a potential species bias that could affect the care of pets.
This tendency toward humanization can raise risks for both pets and people, as people may ignore signs of discomfort or put pets in situations they cannot handle because they believe the animals will never harm them.
For example, many dog bites involving children occur with family dogs when unsupervised, and the child’s behavior toward the dog is the most common trigger.
Reference report: an MDPI study on animal emotions, 2023.
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