If you have a dog at home, there’s probably a story you can tell about how your dog came to cuddle you when you needed it without you having to say anything.
A new study highlights how deep the bond goes between a person and their dog. The study shows that dogs are more in tune with us and can actually smell our stress. Here’s what the study found.
A study titled “The odor of an unfamiliar stressed or relaxed person affects dogs’ responses to a cognitive bias test” was published in Scientific Reports on July 22, 2024, and the results are really interesting.
The study used dogs who weren’t paired with their humans because they wanted to get a better baseline for what dogs are able or not able to do, since they’ll read non-verbal cues from their human parent, and the research team didn’t want that.
“Using a cognitive bias task, we tested how human odors affect dogs’ likelihood of approaching a food bowl placed at three ambiguous locations (‘near-positive,” middle’ and ‘near-negative’) between trained ‘positive’ (rewarded) and ‘negative” (unrewarded) locations,” the study explained.
The study wanted to better understand the role of smell in “stress-signlaling; and how that might impact a working dog’s ability.
“This study aims to better understand the role of olfaction in stress-signalling between humans and dogs and the implications on the welfare and working performance of dogs.”
How the Study Worked to Show Dogs Can Smell Stress
According to the abstract from the study report, the research team used odor samples from three unfamiliar volunteers. These samples were taken while the person was stressed and relaxed; those samples were tested for 18 dogs under three conditions: relaxed odor, stress odor, and no odor.
The findings showed the dogs performed differently when they smelled a stressed odor strip.
The study revealed that “when exposed to stress odor during session three, dogs were significantly less likely to approach a bowl placed at one of the three ambiguous locations (near-negative) compared to no odor, indicating possible risk-reduction behaviors in response to the smell of human stress.”
The study’s findings suggest stress “may not just travel down the lead (as is often stated) but also through the air.”
Adding, “If the odor from stressed humans affects a dog’s emotional state, perception of rewards, or ability to learn, it suggests that stress may not just travel down the lead (as is often stated) but also through the air.”
“The team also found that dogs continued to improve their learning about the presence or absence of food in the two trained bowl locations and that they improved faster when the stress smell was present,” a press release shared.
The research team is excited about the study and the findings. “Understanding how human stress affects dogs’ wellbeing is an important consideration for dogs in kennels and when training companion dogs and dogs for working roles such as assistance dogs,” senior author Nicola Rooney, a human-animal interactions researcher at the University of Bristol, said.
Researchers are excited to expand on the findings, and it all goes deeper into helping us better understand man’s best friends.
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