New research reveals that humans are surprisingly bad at reading their dogs’ emotions.
Instead of looking at the dog’s behavior, we judge emotions based on the situation. People assume a dog is happy or sad depending on what’s happening around them, not what they’re actually doing. Adding to the confusion, humans also project their own emotions onto dogs. To truly understand our pets, we need to be aware of these biases and focus on their unique signals.
Understanding the Human-Dog Communication Gap
Life with a dog is a constant exchange—especially when it comes to communication. Since humans and dogs don’t share a common language, understanding each other depends on interpreting behavior and emotional cues. That process often feels effortless. You hand your dog a treat, she looks into your eyes as if to say, “I’m thrilled to have this!” With a wag of her tail, she takes the treat and trots off happily. In that moment, you feel a deep connection with your pet.
Or at least, that’s what you believe.
New research from Arizona State University suggests that people often misinterpret their dog’s emotions. One key reason? Humans tend to project their own feelings onto their pets rather than accurately reading canine expressions.
How Context Clouds Canine Emotions
In their study,“Barking up the wrong tree: Human perceptions of dog emotions is influenced by extraneous factors,” ASU researchers Holly Molinaro and Clive Wynne conducted experiments to examine how people perceive dog emotions. Their findings indicate that most humans don’t assess a dog’s emotional state based on the dog’s behavior alone. Instead, they rely on the context of the situation to make assumptions.
“People do not look at what the dog is doing, instead they look at the situation surrounding the dog and base their emotional perception off of that,” said Molinaro, an ASU Ph.D. student in psychology and animal welfare scientist.
“Our dogs are trying to communicate with us, but we humans seem determined to look at everything except the poor pooch himself,” added Wynne, an ASU psychology professor who studies dog behavior and the human-dog bond.
Adding to the misunderstanding is a human projection of their feelings onto the dog. This “anthropomorphizing” of the interaction further clouds truly understanding what your dog’s emotional state actually may be, what she is trying to tell you.
The Experiment: Testing Human Perception
In two experiments, Molinaro and Wynne investigated human perception of dog emotions. They video recorded a dog in what they believed were positive (happy-making) or negative (less happy) situations.
The happy situations were things like offering the leash or a treat, and the unhappy scenarios included gentle chastisement, or bringing out the dreaded vacuum cleaner. Then, in one experiment they showed ordinary members of the public these videos with and without their visual background. In the second experiment they edited the videos so the dog who had been filmed in a happy context looked like he had been recorded in an unhappy situation, and the dog who had been filmed in an unhappy situation looked like he was in a happy one. In both experiments, people rated how happy and excited they thought the dogs were. Sample size for the first experiment was 383 and for the second experiment was 485.
Surprising Findings: People Ignore the Dog!
What the researchers found was that people’s perception of the dog’s mood was based on everything in the videos besides the dog himself.
“People do not look at what the dog is doing, instead, they look at the situation surrounding the dog and base their emotional perception on that,” Molinaro said. “You see a dog getting a treat, you assume he must be feeling good. You see a dog getting yelled at, you assume he’s feeling bad. These assumptions of how you think the dog is feeling have nothing to do with the dog’s behavior or emotional cues, which is very striking.”
“In our study, when people saw a video of a dog apparently reacting to a vacuum cleaner, everyone said the dog was feeling bad and agitated,” she continued. “But when they saw a video of the dog doing the exact same thing, but this time appearing to react to seeing his leash, everyone reported that the dog was feeling happy and calm. People were not judging a dog’s emotions based on the dog’s behavior, but on the situation the dog was in.”
The Problem of Projection: Human Bias in Action
Further complicating the communication process is people’s projection of their emotions onto the dog. Molinaro explained that while humans and dogs have shared a bond over the centuries, that doesn’t mean their emotional processing, or even emotional expressions, are the same.
“I have always found this idea that dogs and humans must have the same emotions to be very biased and without any real scientific proof to back it up, so I wanted to see if there are factors that might actually be affecting our perception of dog emotions,” Molinaro said. “If there were, if we as humans focused on other aspects not relating to the dog to deduce their emotional state, then as both scientists and pet owners, we really have to go back to the drawing board.”
The Science Behind Emotional Perception
Molinaro explained that even in studies of human perception of human emotions it is clear that there is more to reading emotion than just looking at a person’s face. Culture, mood, situational context, even a previous facial expression can influence how people perceive emotions. Yet when it comes to animal emotions, no one has yet studied if those same factors affect us in the same way.
“Our research here shows that for one of those factors, the situational context, it does.”
How to Truly Understand Your Dog
So how does a good dog owner cut through the biases and misreadings to understand their pets true emotional state?
“The first step is just to be aware that we are not that good at reading dogs’ emotions,” she said. “We need to be humbler in our understanding of our dogs. Once we can start from a basis of understanding our biases, we can begin to look at our pups in a new light.”
“Every dog’s personality, and thus her emotional expressions, are unique to that dog,” Molinaro explains. “Really pay attention to your own dog’s cues and behaviors.”
Building a Stronger Bond with Your Dog
“When you yell at your dog for doing something bad and she makes that guilty face, is it really because she is guilty, or is it because she is scared you are going to reprimand her more? Taking an extra second or two to focus on your dog’s behaviors, knowing that you need to overcome a bias to view the situation around the dog rather than the dog himself, can go a long way in getting a true read on your own dog’s emotional state, leading to a stronger bond between the two of you.”
Molinaro and Wynne’s research is published in the journal Anthrozoos.
Reference: “Barking up the wrong tree: Human perceptions of dog emotions is influenced by extraneous factors” 10 March 2025, Anthrozoös.
DOI: 10.1080/08927936.2025.2469400
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