Volume 162, January 2015, Pages 37–46
How do humans represent the emotions of dogs? The resemblance between the human representation of the canine and the human affective space
Highlights
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- Dog-owners think that humans recognize many emotions in dogs.
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- Subjects report that humans recognize more emotions in dogs than dogs in humans.
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- Subjects think that primary emotions are more recognizable than secondary ones.
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- Activity and assertiveness underlie the human-constructed affective space of dogs.
Abstract
As
(critical) anthropomorphism provides a useful hypothesis for looking at
animal behavior, people's reports about how they see animals’ emotions
can provide a start point in the direction of experiment-oriented
studies. It has been shown that humans attribute a wide range of
emotions to animals. The concept of ‘affective space’ is often used to
model human emotional states in a dimensional way. However, there has
been no study carried out on how humans may construct non-human animals’
affective space. Our aim was to assess owners’ attribution of emotions
to their dogs (Canis familiaris), and to construct the
affective space for dogs. We used two questionnaires to investigate
owners’ opinion about (1) the emotions that humans can recognize in dogs
and dogs can recognize in humans, and (2) the behavior elements that
characterize certain emotions. The first questionnaire revealed that
humans are reported to perceive a wide range of emotions in dogs. The
reported contingencies between behavior elements and emotions in the
second questionnaire were analyzed using correspondence analysis. The
resulting two-dimensional affective space showed similarity to those
found in human studies: the two dimensions were interpreted as
‘activity’ and ‘assertiveness’. The results suggest that humans
represent dogs’ emotions in a partly similar way to their own. These
similarities could reflect anthropomorphism and/or homologies in the
expression of emotional states. The understanding of how humans
represent animal emotions could provide both a step in the direction of
experimental studies of animal emotions and also an important knowledge
about ‘folk animal psychology’ which shapes the socially constructed
concept of animal welfare.
Keywords
- Emotion;
- Dog;
- Affective space;
- Correspondence analysis
- Corresponding author. Tel.:
+36 1 3812179; fax: +36 1 3812180.
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- Tel.: +36 1 3812179; fax: +36 1 3812180.
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