Do dogs reflect their owners emotions

Q: Do dogs personalities reflect their owners?

She said dogs are sensitive to their owners emotional states and may mirror their emotions. Dogs have lived alongside humans for more than 30,000 years. Evidence shows they can pick up emotional information from people and adjust their behaviour accordingly. The research is published in the journal, PLOS ONE.

Table of Contents Show

What did the research find?
Do dogs personalities reflect their owners?
Do dogs know when their owner is sad?
Do dogs get emotionally attached to their owners?

A border collie jumps to catch a flying disc during a competition. New research suggests that dog stress mirrors owner stress, especially in dogs and humans who compete together. Bela Szandelszky/AP hide caption

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Bela Szandelszky/AP

A border collie jumps to catch a flying disc during a competition. New research suggests that dog stress mirrors owner stress, especially in dogs and humans who compete together.

Bela Szandelszky/AP

Updated at 9:34 a.m. ET

If you are neurotic and anxious, your dog may be feeling the stress, too.

Numerous studies have found that dogs and their owners can experience synchronized emotions and stress levels, especially during acutely stressful or exciting activities such as competitions or police work. A new study followed dogs and their owners over the course of months to see how stress hormones in both animal and human changed over time.

The results suggest that dogs may be quite sensitive to human stress. "If the owner is stressed, then the dog is also likely to mirror that stress," explains Lina Roth, a professor at Linkoping University in Sweden and an author of the study published today in Nature's Scientific Reports.

Roth and her colleagues surveyed 58 dogs and their owners. Owners answered questions about traits including extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism and openness.

They also were asked to fill out surveys scoring their dogs on traits such as excitability, responsiveness to training, aggression and fearfulness. The researchers then took hair samples from the dogs and their owners to test for the stress-related hormone cortisol.

"Cortisol is incorporated in hair as it grows, so we get kind of a retrospective of our cortisol secretions," Roth explains.

They found that dog cortisol levels seemed to mirror the personality traits of their owners.

"It was the owner's personality that influenced the dog's hair cortisol level, rather than the dog's personality itself," Roth says. The correlation was stronger between dogs and owners who compete together than it was between owners and dogs who don't.

"When it comes to competing dogs, it could actually be that they spend more time together, and that this training could increase this emotional closeness," Roth speculates, though she adds that "this is a correlation, so we really don't know the mechanism behind this."

Roth says she would like to do follow-up studies looking at more dog breeds — this research focused on border collies and Shetland sheepdogs. She is also interested in how owner gender might influence the results. This study included only female owners.

Rosemary Strasser, a behavioral neuroendocrinologist at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, who has studied connections between dogs and humans, says the new research is exciting and that it raises further questions about how dogs and humans influence each other emotionally.

One big question: Could dogs also influence human stress levels over time? "Especially with dogs being used as service or support dogs for individuals," Strasser says, "if you place a confident, outgoing dog in a home, how does it influence the personality of that owner? Is it always one-directional? That would be a very interesting further extension of this."

Previous research has suggested that the personality and attitude of a dog owner can influence how emotionally attached that person becomes to their pet. "A person who likes dogs and wants a dog will interact with that dog differently than a person who may be given or exposed to a dog that they don't necessarily want," Strasser says.

Both researchers caution that dog owners should not read the new research results and worry that their personalities are harming their animals. The study doesn't suggest, for example, that neurotic humans are causing their dogs to act neurotically, as well.

"I don't think you should be anxious that, if you're stressed, you might harm your dog," Roth says. "Instead, your dog is a social support for you, and you are a social support for the dog."

Dog with owner at home

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Dogs have always been known for being able to quickly react to human emotions, caring for their owners when they're sad or afraid. But now a new study has revealed that dogs can actually adopt our emotions and feel them for us, especially when it comes to stress.

Conducted by researchers at the Linköping University in Sweden, the study analysed the lifestyle of 25 Boarder Collies and 33 Shetland Sheepdogs who lived with their owners at home. They looked into the stress hormone cortisol, which circulates in the body and can be traced in strands of hair.

What did the research find?

The scientists discovered that humans with higher levels of cortisol in their hair also had dogs with the stress hormone in their hair. This link differed throughout the seasons and appeared to be higher in dogs throughout the winter months.

"We found that the levels of long-term cortisol in the dog and its owner were synchronised, such that owners with high cortisol levels have dogs with high cortisol levels, while owners with low cortisol levels have dogs with low levels," Ann-Sofie Sundman of the Department of Physics explained in the study.

Lina Roth, senior lecturer in the study also said: "Surprisingly enough, we found no major effect of the dog’s personality on long-term stress. The personality of the owner, on the other hand, had a strong effect. This has led us to suggest that the dog mirrors its owner’s stress."

Dog with owner indoors

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It shows there is a clear correlation between the stress in a human and the stress dogs also feel. So the next time you feel stressed, remember that your dog can probably feel it too — and they may be wanting to help you.

The idea for the study first came from previous research which showed that dogs can mirror their owner's emotions. Whether it's comforting owners when they are sad or rejoicing with them when they are happy, dogs are wonderful animals to help us with whatever we are going through.

Just another reason to adopt one of your own.

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Do dogs personalities reflect their owners?

She said dogs are sensitive to their owners' emotional states and may mirror their emotions. Dogs have lived alongside humans for more than 30,000 years. Evidence shows they can pick up emotional information from people and adjust their behaviour accordingly. The research is published in the journal, PLOS ONE.

Do dogs know when their owner is sad?

Studies show that dogs are sensitive to emotional contagion which is responding to the emotions of another without understanding what they are feeling. Your dog knows you are experiencing poor feelings even if they aren't sure how you feel, so they provide comfort.

Do dogs get emotionally attached to their owners?

Dogs have a special chemistry with humans and often form an attachment relationship with their caregivers, so it's not surprising that they may feel anxious or experience stress when separated from them. It may seem like younger dogs are more vulnerable to stress and fear, but the opposite is actually true.