Does your dog seem to run to you to comfort you when you cry? If so, you are not alone in having this impression: there are indeed numerous testimonials from owners! But these anecdotes, as touching as they are, do not alone prove that dogs feel empathy for us. To confirm this hypothesis, researchers therefore decided to test it under controlled conditions. Their question was simple: Do dogs really respond to human distress, including crying, or are they simply attracted to unusual behavior that arouses their curiosity?
Dogs are more likely to seek out a person who is crying
To answer this question, researchers studied the behavior of 18 pet dogs in several situations. Each animal was confronted by its owner or an unknown person who could either cry or hum. Here, humming served as a control situation because it is an unusual behavior that might attract a dog's attention, but does not signal negative emotion. In certain situations, the dogs also had to overcome an obstacle to reach the person, in order to assess their motivation to approach.
The results, published in the journal Animal Cognition*, showed that dogs moved more often towards a person who was crying than towards a person who was humming. They were also more likely to make an effort to achieve it. Once near this person, they showed more contact behaviors, such as sniffing, licking or touching with the muzzle. This reaction appeared with their owner as well as with a stranger, which suggests that it did not depend solely on the emotional bond between the dog and its master.
These types of behaviors can be compared to a form of heterospecific empathy, that is to say an ability to be sensitive to the emotions of an individual belonging to another species. In dogs, this sensitivity could translate into pro-social behavior: a tendency to come towards another individual and try to provide them with a form of support when they seem to be in difficulty.
Can we really talk about empathy in dogs?
However, these results do not confirm that dogs feel empathy exactly like humans. Researchers instead speak of “empathic-like responding”. Indeed, it is impossible to know precisely what is going on in a doggie's mind. Does he feel compassion? Is he simply trying to reduce a situation that disturbs him? Or does it respond to a behavior learned through its interactions with humans?
One of the favored explanations is that of emotional contagion. To put it simply, the dog could be sensitive to a person's emotional state and itself be influenced by this emotion. Through domestication and shared experiences with humans, it would also have learned that approaching a person in distress is an appropriate reaction.
This study therefore constitutes an important advance in the understanding of the relationships between dogs and humans. It shows that our four-legged companions not only react to unusual sounds or behaviors, but that they seem to be particularly sensitive to signals associated with human distress. Researchers nevertheless remain cautious: these observations certainly open the way to the study of the mechanisms hidden behind this behavior, but it does not yet allow us to conclude that empathy is comparable to that of humans.
*Custance, D. & Mayer, J., “Empathetic-like responding by domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) to distress in humans: an exploratory study”, Animal Cognition, 15(5), 2012, 851–859.