Do Dogs Experience Emotions?

What a silly question, you say. Of course, they do!

Princess demonstrates visible happiness when you return home, ecstasy when you prepare to feed her and joy when you grab the leash and get ready for a walk. And don’t forget fear of thunder, anger at other dogs and sadness when put on your coat and leave the house without her.

Not So Fast

Psychologists, philosophers and poets have struggled for millennia to define human emotion and describe its foundations in our brains and psyches. If we barely understand the human substrates and manifestations of emotion, how well can we really understand the feelings of other species?

Happy Brown and White Puppy Walking on a Purple Leash

Take happiness as an example. Your dog loves to flip over and get a belly rub. Clearly that makes him happy – otherwise he wouldn’t do it. You’re actually sharing a moment of mutual affection, you say, pleasurable for both of you. The problem is that dogs don’t engage in that behavior as an expression of pleasure within their own species. Indeed, rolling over and exposing the belly is a submissive behavior in the pack. So how can we interpret that as a sign of affection in our pets?

Perhaps dogs have a repertoire of behaviors they employ flexibly with different companions. Maybe they learn how to express emotion as part of their special relationships with people. What signals a dominant relationship between canines might mean something different in their interactions with homo sapiens.

What Does the Research Say?

While poets and philosophers have splashed about in an ocean of metaphors to characterize emotions, scientists have tried looking at the human brain to determine how our cerebral functions map against the emotions we perceive. They use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning to observe brain function in various emotional states. But anyone who has endured an MRI knows that it’s not a pleasant experience – claustrophobic and noisy. No dog would willingly tolerate it. How then to get a dog to (literally) stand still for one?

Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University, tried a novel approach. He and his colleagues trained a group of dogs to walk into the MRI tube, put their heads on a pillow and hold completely still for as long as 30 seconds. The animals also learned to tolerate wearing earmuffs to protect their ears from the 95-decibel noise the MRI scanner makes. These specially trained pooches became the subjects of the first real efforts to do doggie brain scans.

Dark Brown and White Puppy in Dog Training

Dogs are a Lot Like People

The scans they obtained revealed remarkable similarities between the human brain and the canine brain in a key area: the caudate nucleus. The caudate nucleus plays important roles in various motor and non-motor functions, including learning and reward system experiences. The caudate has also been implicated in responses to visual beauty and has been suggested as one of the neural correlates of enjoyment and even love, including romantic attraction.

In dogs, the researchers found that caudate activity increased in response to hand signals indicating food. This brain region also showed activity when the dogs detected the smells of familiar humans and perceived the return of an owner who had briefly stepped out of view. In other words, the dog and human caudate nuclei are homologous – i.e., they have similar roles in our two species.

Does all this brain research prove that dogs love us? Not completely. Dogs probably don’t experience metacognition, meaning they don’t think about what they’re feeling. Moreover, as rich as their communication skills are, they can’t describe in words what their emotional experiences might be. Nevertheless, many positive emotional stimuli that activate the human caudate have the same effect on the canine caudate. It doesn’t seem too farfetched to speculate that dogs possess the sentience necessary to experience emotions, perhaps at about the same level as a human child.

Adorable Dog Tilting Head at Camera

What About Higher-Level Emotions?

Researchers and pet owners mostly contemplate whether and how dogs experience fairly basic emotions. But what about higher-level experiences – pity, guilt, regret? When your dog gives you the big “I’m-too-cute-to-scold” eyes after snatching steaks off the counter, is she feeling guilty? Or has she learned merely to manipulate you emotionally? Which, let’s face it, is a pretty sophisticated use of emotional cues.

We have no problem saying that we love our pets, and we’d like to believe that they love us in return. More research is needed, but it appears that just may be true.

All Images Courtesy of MobilityDog.org.