We’re Not as Good at Reading Our Dogs’ Emotions as We Thought, Study Finds

We like to think we know our pups like the back of our hands — and vice versa. But as deeply bonded as we our to our dogs, their feelings may be more of a mystery than we thought. A new study published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science found that humans overestimate our ability to identify dogs’ emotions, and there are some that we’re particularly bad at reading.

During the study, 447 participants were shown 44 short video clips of dogs displaying emotions including anger, appeasement, fear, frustration, happiness, neutral, pain, positive anticipation, sadness, separation-distress, and surprise. After viewing the clips, they were asked to choose which of the 11 emotions the dog experienced.

The researchers found that overall, humans have some skill at recognizing emotional reactions in pups. “The findings suggested that humans can recognize many dog emotions at above-chance level purely based on dog visual response/behavior without knowing the associated emotional trigger and wider preceding context,” wrote Kun Guo, the study’s lead author.

Some emotions are harder to read

However, participants sometimes struggled to identify emotions when presented with only a dog’s facial expression; generally, they were better at reading a dog’s body language. This varied depending on the emotion, though. Participants were able to read anger, anticipation, and surprise as easily through facial expression, but needed bodily cues to identify happiness, sadness, pain, and fear.

Fear and frustration were extra difficult for humans to read. When basing their answers on facial expression alone, humans often confused fear and happiness — and recognizing frustration was even trickier. “In this study, frustration was the only tested dog emotion that did not attract above-chance recognition,” Guo wrote. Researchers propose that this could be because the definition of “frustration” is unclear for some people, or because of “the diversity of situations which might be considered ‘frustrating.’”

Humans overestimate how well we can read dogs’ emotions

Overall, humans are decent at understanding dogs’ emotional states — but not as good as we think we are. “In a self-report task, dog owners reported higher performance in recognizing the same range of emotions listed above in their dogs’ daily activities,” Guo wrote, referencing a 2023 study.

In the self-report study, researchers found that 96 percent of pet parents believed they could identify happiness, compared to a finding of only 63 percent accuracy measured in the new study; 86 percent believed they could identify distress compared to only 23 percent in the new study, and 89 percent believed they could identify fear compared to only 16 percent in the new study. “Clearly there exists large discrepancies between ‘what we believe’ and ‘what we can do’ in relation to detecting (at least some) dog emotions,” Guo added.

So, you may not be as good as you think you are at reading your dog — but that doesn’t mean you’re not an attentive pet parent Your pup might just be a tougher nut to crack than you knew.