Dogs have been considered humans’ best friends for thousands of years—a long enough time to get to know each other well. However, new research from Arizona State University’s Canine Science Laboratory shows that people sometimes do not understand their dogs’ emotions as clearly as they think. According to the website Science Alert, the study found that interpretations of dogs’ emotions can be influenced by their owners’ own mental and emotional states.
Mental and emotional state
Animal behavior researchers Holly Molinaro and Clive Wynne reported in a study published in early 2025 that dog owners often judge their dogs’ emotions based on the situation, which can make their perceptions biased. For example, a person may assume their dog is happier while bathing in the garden than at another time, regardless of the actual signals the pet is showing.
Explaining the findings at the time of publication, Molinaro said:
“Although people think they know what their dog is feeling, we found that they are actually judging dogs’ emotions based on the situation.”
Molinaro and Wynne’s new research also examined another factor that can influence human perception of dogs’ emotions: the humans’ own mental and emotional state.
Blurring the background
Researchers reviewed videos of dogs with the help of 300 university students. The videos objectively depicted positive, neutral, or negative emotional states. To ensure that the dogs’ environments did not influence viewers’ perceptions, the backgrounds of the videos were blurred.
In the first experiment, human participants were induced into positive, neutral, or negative mental states using images unrelated to animals (such as natural landscapes and photos of people)—a method proven effective in many psychological studies. Although this approach affected participants’ self-reported emotional states, it had no impact on how they perceived the dogs’ emotional states in the videos—an unexpected result.
Open-access images
In the second experiment, Molinaro and Wynne prepared dog-related stimulus material for participants, selected from an open-access database of emotional impact images, consisting of distinctive dog photographs. This initial material also successfully induced positive, neutral, or negative emotional states in participants; however, its effects on their ability to understand dogs’ emotions were confusing.
Owners’ biases
Participants placed in a positive emotional state tended to rate the dogs as sadder, while those in a negative emotional state perceived the dogs as happier than they actually were. These results indicate that biases exist in how dog owners interpret dogs’ emotions—and that these biases are far more complex than Molinaro and Wynne initially expected. Much more work remains to be done on this topic.
Pet rehabilitation
Wynne says:
“In the United States alone, there are about 80 million dogs, so we make every effort to help people and their dogs live better, happier lives together. We already know that taking time to understand and meet a dog’s needs significantly improves the chances of raising a safe, calm, and well-balanced dog.”
Research of this kind not only helps improve animal care, but can also play an important role in making rehabilitation efforts more effective for aggressive, anxious, or stress-affected pets.