Dog psychology

Dog psychology is a rapidly expanding field that uses scientific methods to study all aspects of dog behavior and mental functions. Whereas earlier studies used dogs to uncover principles of learned behavior that apply to all species, recent studies are more likely to highlight differences in cognition between dogs and other animals, especially as they pertain to their interactions with humans. Dog psychology is also concerned with the origin and treatment of problem behaviors in dogs.

TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Animal behavorial; Cognitive; Comparative

Introduction

Dog psychology asks many of the same fundamental questions about dog behavior that psychologists have asked about human behavior. How do dogs perceive and think about the world? How do they learn and what do they remember? How are their interactions with their physical and social environments shaped by biology, evolution, and experience? Do dogs have personalities? Why do some dogs exhibit symptoms of distress and how should clinical problems in dogs like anxiety, excessive fear, and compulsive behavior be treated? All of these questions are motivated by a desire to understand dog behavior in terms of underlying mental processes and internal states.

The approach used to answer these questions about dog behavior is based on scientific methodology, the same approach used to study human behavior. Theories are formulated, specific hypotheses are developed and tested through observation and experiment, the findings are interpreted with the support of statistical analyses, and the original theories are subsequently refined, amended or, occasionally, abandoned.

Historically, dogs were important in studies of the general principles of learned behavior. Ivan Pavlov’s seminal studies of classically conditioned salivation in dogs laid the foundation for our understanding of how human behavior can be changed by experience and for the development of treatments for addiction and phobias that are in use today. In the 1950s and 1960s, John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller used five representative dog breeds to examine the role of heredity in the development of behavior. Although the use of dogs as model systems continues today, contemporary research reflects a broader interest in dogs and their relationship to humans, including their comparatively superior sensitivity to human communicative cues.

Sensing the world

Dogs acquire information about their environment using the same sensory modalities that humans use but, because of structural differences in their sensory systems, the quality of their perceptual experiences is not identical. Understanding the sensory systems of dogs and any breed influences is crucial for developing appropriate stimuli for studying other aspects of dog psychology. Most research has focused on vision, hearing, and olfaction.

In both dogs and humans, vision depends on two types of retinal photoreceptors, cones and rods. Differences in the properties, number, distribution, and wiring of these receptors account for the dichromatic color vision of dogs, their superior vision in dim light, and their poorer visual acuity in bright light. In addition, whereas humans have forward-oriented eyes, dogs have eyes that are positioned more laterally giving them a wider field of view but a narrower field of binocular vision.

Color vision is dependent on cone receptors. Normal human color vision is trichromatic but a study of just three dogs revealed only two classes of cone photopigment: one that responds maximally to a wavelength of 555 nm (perceived as yellowish) and another that responds maximally to 429 to 435 nm (perceived as bluish). Thus, the blue-yellow color vision of dogs is most similar to that of a human deuteranope, a person with red-green color blindness. Night vision, which is rod dependent, is three to four times more sensitive in dogs than in humans and is aided by a sheet of light-reflecting cells, the tapetum lucidum, located at the back of the dog’s eye.

Dogs do not see as clearly in daylight as humans do. They lack a well-defined fovea populated by cone receptors mapped onto retinal ganglion cells in a one-to-one ratio. Instead, their retinal ganglion cells receive inputs from several receptors and form a horizontally elongated oval-shaped area, the visual streak. The intensity of the visual streak is correlated with skull length and appears least pronounced and more circular in shape in flat-faced (brachycephalic) dog breeds. It has been suggested that this change which is also accompanied by more frontally located eyes may improve perception of human faces.

Hearing research has shown that dogs detect not only frequencies in the range audible to the human ear but high (ultrasonic) frequencies that are inaudible to humans. In general, dogs hear frequencies up to 45 kHz, well above the upper limit of about 20 kHz for human hearing. Audiograms for four dogs, each representing a different breed, were found to be quite similar despite considerable differences in their body size, the area of their tympanic membrane, the distance between their ears, and the shape of their pinnae (upright or floppy).

Dogs have a remarkable ability to detect scents and have been trained to report the presence of odors from narcotics, explosives, and cancers at concentrations that are imperceptible to humans. Sniffing draws the odor molecules into the dog’s nose where they come into contact with the receptors on the olfactory epithelium. These neural signals are then decoded by the olfactory bulb in the brain. Even the smallest dog has tens of millions more receptors, a more expansive olfactory epithelium, and a substantially larger olfactory bulb than a human does. Dogs also pump fluid containing scent molecules into their vomeronasal organ, a structure that humans do not have. This system is used in the processing of social odors or pheromones.

Cognition

Cognition studies encompass a wide range of topics including knowledge of object properties and the physical world, learning about events and consequences, the nature and duration of memory, communication, and problem solving. Whereas some areas have more than a hundred year history of research, others have been examined only very recently in dogs.

Learning through association was famously demonstrated in Pavlov’s studies of conditioned salivation in dogs which showed that a previously neutral stimulus comes to elicit a new response, salivation, following its repeated pairing with food which automatically elicits salivation. Dogs were also subjects in Edward L. Thorndike’s classic puzzle box experiments, better known for using cats, which led him to formulate the law of effect in 1898 to explain how reward and punishment altered instrumental behavior. These approaches to learning in animals dominated psychology for many decades, although not without criticism. In the late 1960s, experiments revealed that Pavlovian conditioned responses depended upon the CS-US contingency and contributed to the contemporary view that only surprising or unpredicted events stimulate associative learning. In the 1980s, experiments demonstrated that instrumental behavior was sensitive to a change in the value of its consequences and corroborated the viability of a goal-directed rather than strictly habit-based analysis of instrumental learning.

Dog training methods have been heavily influenced by the study of learning in experimental psychology. Studies have begun to assess the relative effectiveness and psychological impact of fear-based approaches including correction procedures and negative reinforcement such as constructional aggression treatment (CAT), reward-based approaches including shaping and clicker training, and social methods that use modeling or observational techniques such as the do-as-I-do method.

One of the fastest growing areas of cognition research examines dogs’ use of human-given cues, such as pointing, bowing, or head turning, to solve a problem. In a typical set-up, food has been hidden in one of two identical containers and a human helps the dog choose by pointing towards the baited container. Studies have shown that dogs outperform wolves, horses, and primates on these tasks and that their ability to use human attentional state and referential signaling is present early in development. Several hypotheses have been considered to explain the superior performance of dogs on these tasks including selection of this trait during domestication, an effect of cohabitation with humans, and associative learning.

Studies of cognitive development have examined what puppies know about the physical world using techniques similar to those used with human infants such as searching for an object that has disappeared from view. Cognition research with elderly dogs has been important in recognizing a syndrome that is similar to Alzheimer’s disease. The symptoms in dogs, which include disorientation, disruption of activity and sleep, and poor performance on memory tests, are associated with pathogenic changes in the brain and may be improved through an antioxidant-rich diet and selegiline, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.

Social behavior

Dogs have long been regarded as having evolved from a wolf ancestor although the how, when, and where remain in dispute. Traditionally, they have been characterized as pack animals equipped with wolf-like instincts to protect their members, defend resources, and vie for alpha status in the pack hierarchy. Current research recognizes the limitations inherent in using wolf behavior to comprehend dog social behavior. Issues that have received substantial attention in the research literature are the socialization period, intraspecific communication, and dominance.

The concept of a critical or sensitive period is common in psychology. It implies a window of limited duration for appropriate experiences to lay the groundwork for normal development. The optimal window for social bonding in dogs extends from 3 weeks to at least 12 weeks, before fear of novelty overrides their inclination to approach social stimuli. Evidence of the importance of early socialization comes from several sources. Livestock guarding dogs, like the Maremma, instinctively protect sheep from predation if raised with lambs as young puppies. In the Bar Harbor studies of the 1950s and 1960s, puppies were raised under varying conditions of social impoverishment; those reared with minimal human contact later feared people. Such findings suggest that puppies should be given some exposure to the types of environments and stimuli they will likely encounter as adults.

Dogs use a number of facial, postural, and vocal expressions to signal their emotional state. For example, a relaxed open mouth and a loosely wagging tail indicate a friendly disposition and invite approach whereas a wrinkled muzzle with bared teeth, raised hackles, and a stiff, erect tail state the opposite. However, selective and designer breeding have created communication handicaps as the capacity for displaying visual signals is diminished by drastic morphological alterations in some breeds. Research on vocalization has shown that dogs and humans can correctly identify the emotional contexts associated with barks and growls. While the expression of these signals is largely innate, some evidence from studies of play suggests that their meaning may be learned.

Dominant and submissive are labels used to denote the social status of individuals in a pack. Behavioral displays associated with dominance include confident approach, raised tail, eye contact, mounting, laying a paw across another dog’s back, raised leg urination, ground scratching and overmarking. In contrast, during an interaction with a dominant dog, submissive dogs keep their tails low or tucked between their legs, avert their gaze, lick the mouth of the dominant dog, roll on their backs, and dribble urine. Many of these signals are commonly directed towards human members of the dog’s pack. The method of dominance reduction for resolving problem behaviors including aggression has been deemed unsafe. Moreover, research has questioned the original assumptions about wolf social behavior on which dominance reduction was based.

Individual differences

Dog psychology is also concerned with explaining how and why dogs behave differently from each other. For example, the aim of personality research is to characterize individual differences among dogs that are stable over time and have the power to predict patterns of behavior across a range of situations. The aim of clinical research is to identify the etiology, diagnosis, and treatment of psychological disorders that can severely compromise a dog’s quality of life. Additionally, personality and clinical research on dogs may be undertaken because of the potential insights such studies may yield for our understanding of human behavior, particularly from the perspectives of genetics and pharmacology.

A popular approach to personality research in animals is based on the five factor theory of human personality. For dogs, the four relevant traits to be measured are active-inactive, affectionate-aggressive, anxious-calm, and intelligent-stupid. Personality profiles are derived from questionnaires completed by dog owners or from observations of dogs in natural or contrived situations. Personality profiling may be useful for early assessment of the suitability of puppies for future service work. One study used foster-owner ratings of German shepherd puppies on the Canine Behavior Assessment and Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ) which consists of questions about the frequency and severity of various behaviors. Three months later, the puppies were given a temperament test which quantifies reactions to various stimuli and social situations and is used by the Swedish military to determine suitability for military service. Statistical analyses revealed that C-BARQ scores predicted behavior on the temperament test. Puppy screening is in place for protection and detection work in law enforcement and for training as seeing-eye dogs, hearing dogs, medical alert and response dogs, and therapy and assistance dogs.

There is substantial research on three clinical issues in dogs: aggression, compulsive behavior, and separation anxiety. Aggression toward humans and other animals is a leading cause of canine euthanasia or relinquishment to a shelter. Aggressive behavior has been attributed to a number of factors including inadequate socialization, learning, brain serotonin imbalance, and genetics. Hypothyroidism has also been linked to aggressive behavior in dogs with one study finding thyroid problems in 60 percent of aggressive dogs. Dog-bite victims tend to be children and the elderly and they are most likely to be bitten by a familiar dog.

Symptoms of compulsive behavior may include excessive licking of paws, flank or blanket sucking, tail or shadow chasing, and fly catching. Breed predispositions have been documented and treatment usually involves pharmacotherapy. The stress of confinement and lack of exercise, common in a shelter environment, can also induce stereotypical behavior in which affected dogs repetitively rebound off the kennel walls, spin in circles, or pace.

Separation anxiety is a well-documented behavior characterized by vocalization distress, destruction especially toward barriers such as doors and windows, panting and drooling, pacing, and inappropriate elimination. Symptoms usually peak within 20 minutes of owner departure. No single predisposing factor has been identified although dogs with a history of multiple owners, shelter exposure, premature weaning, or severe illness in puppyhood may be most at risk. Behavior modification alone or combined with pharmacotherapy is an effective treatment in many cases.

Bibliography

Bradshaw, J. (2011). Dog Sense. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Dodman, N. H. (1996). The Dog Who Loved Too Much: Tales, Treatments and The Psychology Of Dogs. Bantam.

Hare, Brian, and Vanessa Woods. The Genius of Dogs : Discovering the Unique Intelligence of Man’s Best Friend. London: Oneworld Publications, 2013. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 28 June 2016.

Horowitz, Alexandra. The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves. Viking, 2022. Print.

McConnell, P. B. (2002). The Other End Of The Leash. New York, N.: Ballantine Books.

Miklosi, A. (2007). Dog Behavior, Evolution and Cognition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Robins, Mary. "Dog Cognition: Dogs Are Even Smarter Than You Think." American Kennel Club, 20 May 2021, www.akc.org/expert-advice/lifestyle/dog-cognition-dogs-are-smarter-than-you-think/. Accessed 17 Jan. 2025.