1. It took pet bed-sharers longer than non-pet bed-sharers to get to sleep 
2. Pet bed-sharers woke up more tired, and 
3. Pet bed-sharers were more likely to be woken during the night from dogs barking and animal noises.

Location of dog’s sleeping position (chest) for participants that slept on a double, queen or king size bed and two people in the bed, n = 517

Guest post by: Kirrilly Thompson, B.Soc Sci (Hons), PhD

I had no idea I would meet her a month or so later. That tiny four-legged scientist fell into my lap, sat down and stared at me. I chose her because she was mindful of me. We made space for one another. I brought Angel home on Christmas Eve. She became my therapist. I spent so much time wondering what was going on in her head that I got out of mine. I had a little thing that needed me to get out of bed each morning. She made me smile and laugh. If I slept in, it was to take photos of her sleeping on my bed. If my make-up-free face was in the photo, I didn’t care. Whilst I would never have made it through my ‘black dog’ patch without love and support from my colleagues, friends and family, we all agree that Angel changed my life forever. She also changed my Facebook page.

On the human desire to connect:
            Baumeister, Roy F, and Mark R Leary. 1995. "The need to belong: desire for interpersonal
            attachments as a fundamental human motivation." Psychological bulletin no. 117 (3):497.

90% of Australians report they need to stress less. That's an alarming statistic! Lifeline Australia set up Stress Down Day this July 24 to help people find ways to reduce the stress in their life.

McConnell, AR, Brown, CM, Shoda, TM, Stayton, LE, Martin, CE. (2011) ‘Friends with benefits: on the positive consequences of pet ownership’, Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, vol.101, no.6, pp.1239-1252

Guest post by: Jamie Fratkin, PhD

First off, I just wanted to say that I love reading your blog! ('THANK You!' say Mia and Julie). I think it’s such a great platform to deliver the latest in dog research for both researchers and dog lovers, and I am excited to be able to contribute. 

Dog being dog. Copyright Steve DeBono.

Just as a bit of background on me. I just finished my PhD in Social/Personality Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, working with Sam Gosling. My research focus has been examining personality in dogs as well as examining relationships between dogs and people. The project I’ll be talking about is one that I started in my first year of grad school.

The idea for the project was prompted by a practical question in the context of working dogs. Numbers vary a bit depending on the organization, but only about 50% of the dogs trained and bred for working-dog roles end up succeeding or actually working in the roles they were bred for. Lots of money and time is spent raising and training these dogs and with so few dogs succeeding, it is important to determine the factors that might influence success. If we can find these factors we may be able to train more successful dogs or at least figure out at an early age which puppies are most likely to succeed. 


Many studies have begun to explore the role of personality in working-dog success (e.g., Duffy & Serpell, 2012; Goddard & Beilharz, 1982, Sinn, Gosling, & Hilliard, 2010).  Just as not every person is suitable for every job, not every dog is suitable for every working role. For example, you don’t want a dog that is afraid of traffic to lead a visually impaired person. You also don’t want a dog that is easily distracted to be in charge of detecting explosive devices.

Research suggests that some traits seem to be particularly relevant to a dog’s working success. For example, in the 80s, Goddard & Beilharz conducted a series of studies examining guide dogs in Australia and found low fearfulness was a significant predictor of success.

These other studies are promising but there is practical obstacle to doing them. That is, most experts from working dog organizations are already pressed for time by all of the responsibilities they have to oversee. So they usually don’t have time to undertake the behavioral observations that are key to systematically assessing dogs’ personalities.

So for this study, we wanted to find out whether we could save the experts’ time by having non-experts rate the dog’s assessments instead of the experts. We examined this question in two assessment contexts. One context consisted of Belgian Malinois puppies undertaking a short, very standardized test; dogs were placed in a room and the assessors went through a series of standardized steps to examine the dog’s reactions to various stimuli such as a vacuum cleaner being turned on. The second context consisted of Labrador Retrievers undertaking a longer and less standardized test in which the dogs were walked through different environments and their reactions to the environment were observed and translated into traits like confidence and concentration.  


Experts from working-dog organizations had already rated these assessments. So we recruited non-experts (some of whom had never even owned a dog before) to rate the videos of the behavioral assessments that had already been rated by the experts. We gave the non-experts about an hour of training. These non-experts then watched videos at their own pace and made ratings based on how the dog performed in the assessments.  

In general, we found strong evidence that non-experts could match expert ratings for many traits in both assessments. However, non-experts did not match experts for about 25% of the traits (e.g., dog’s focus on a reward object). The reason for the discrepancies between experts and non-experts could be that some traits are more difficult to observe via video recordings (vs. watching the behavior live), but it also could be that some traits are more difficult for non-experts to observe than experts. Overall, our results suggest that for many traits non-experts can match expert ratings of dog assessments. Given that non-experts are far more abundant than experts, this finding has has wide ranging practical implications for organizations hoping to assess personality in dogs.  

Jamie and Quasia

~ ~ ~
Jamie's study is available via free promotional access until January 2016. This means you can download now and view whenever. For more about the research in the Special Issue of 'Behavioural Processes,' see 'Really, Canine Science is Open Access.'

Learn more about Jamie and her research on her website. 


References:
Duffy, D. L., & Serpell, J. A. (2012). Predictive validity of a method for evaluating temperament in young guide and service dogs. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 138, 99-109. 

Fratkin, J. L., Sinn., D. L., Thomas, S., Hilliard, S., Olson, Z., & Gosling, S. D. (2015). Do you see what I see? Can non-experts with minimal training reproduce expert ratings in behavioral assessments of working dogs? Behavioral Processes, 110, 105-116. 

Goddard, M E., & Beilharz, R. G. (1982). Genetic and environmental factors affecting the suitability of dogs as guide dogs for the blind. Theoretical and Applied Genetics, 62, 97-102. 

Sinn, D. L., Gosling, S. D., & Hilliard, S. (2010). Personality and performance in military working dogs: Reliability and predictive validity of behavioral tests. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 127, 51-65. 

#SPARCS2015, the canine science conference we're hosting in Phoenix, is taking place almost now, June 19-21. 

You can watch the live broadcast for FREE just by going to http://www.sparcsinitiative.org/live-broadcast/

Watching SPARCS2015 is THIS easy

No login, just free access by going to the website. It seems too easy, but it's true!

The conference begins at 9 AM Pacific Time on Friday, June 19th, and speaker talk times and titles are listed here. Stay with us each day until 7:00 PM Pacific Time through until Sunday, June 21. Convert to your local time zone here

We know it's really Phoenix - relax!

Part of our role as hosts is bringing the online audience into the conversation, so get on Twitter and join in!

Canine Science For Everyone!

Mia & Julie

Here we are! In Phoenix! Cacti! Dogs! Science! We have all!

Guest post by: Min Hooi Yong, PhD

“Does your dog know when you are sad?” Puzzling question, perhaps? 

We get a range of answers from dog owners, from the confident “Yes!” to “Maaaaybe?”, and the hopeful “I like to think so...”. Many dogs are considered to be part of the family, and we expect our family members to empathize with us when we are sad.

A recent study found that dogs showed submissive behavior (licking and nuzzling) when an adult person pretended to cry but not when she is humming¹. Does the licking and nuzzling behavior mean that the dog understand that we are feeling sad? (I hear YES-es). Or can it be that because we are crying, we ignore everyone including our dog, and so, our dog will nuzzle us seeking attention and/or comfort?

(source)

There have been many studies showing that animals (e.g. rodents, birds, chimps) experience distress or concern (empathic response) when observing either kin or non-kin in distress. For example, giving electric shocks to rats and pigeons. The observer experienced a change both behaviourally and physiologically, and these responses are often considered as an experience of emotional contagion, an elementary form of empathy. Emotional contagion is essentially the spreading of all forms of emotion from one person (or animal) to another (like the spreading of joy or distress through a crowd - think of a flash mob dance effect filtering through a crowd)².

Hearing a baby cry can be quite distressing. What happens to us when we, the observers, hear the cry? We respond by getting up and checking on the crying baby, “increased attention”. Our body also releases the stress hormone cortisol when we hear the cry, regardless of age or parenting experience^3,4. Also, we can tell if the crying is urgent or not. We do, sometimes find crying aversive (imagine a baby crying non-stop throughout your long-distance flight).

Flickr/thedalogs

In our study, we wanted to know if dogs and humans show a similar physiological response to a baby crying. We had three questions: 

1. We know that dogs are attached to humans, so would dogs show increased attention to a baby crying and babbling? 
2. Exposure to uncontrollable white noise is considered aversive and elicits submissive behavior. If dogs find crying aversive, would dogs show submissive behavior towards crying as well as white noise? 
3. Do dogs show an increased stress response (measured in their salivary cortisol levels) to a baby crying compared to white noise and a baby babbling, similar to humans?

We had 75 dogs and 74 humans listen to one of three sounds. A human baby crying:

A human baby babbling: 

Or white noise:

Each sound was played at an average volume of 82 decibels – similar to chamber music in a small auditorium (not loud enough to cause hearing damage, but it is loud). We collected saliva before and after listening to one sound from both dogs and humans for their cortisol levels. We also analyzed dogs’ behavior while the sound was played, and collected sound ratings about how aversive people found the sounds.

What did our three questions reveal? First, we found that both dogs and humans showed an increase in cortisol levels only after listening to crying, but no changes to baby babbling and white noise. Second, dogs showed increased attention to both the crying and babbling sounds, but not to white noise. Third, dogs displayed increased submissive behavior (e.g. the dog’s body and head were lowered, the ears were held flat and back, the tail was lowered and sometimes slightly between their legs or wagging rapidly side-to-side, the tongue pro-truded slightly, or the dog raised one leg in a hesitant or placating manner) to the crying and white noise, but not to babbling. Additionally, human participants rated the white noise as more aversive than crying (see table below for a summary). We also analyzed other possible aspects that might have influenced the dogs’ responses such as time of testing, demographic data e.g. neutered status and sex, acoustic features in the sounds (pitch and melody), and even dog owners’ unintentional cuing. We found that the responses shown were a result of distress, evident from crying.


You might ask why submissive behavior was shown during crying and white noise. Let’s start with white noise. Our human participants perceived white noise as more unpleasant compared to crying. Humans tend to cover their ears and animals also show similar avoidance, and what better way than to lower your head? On the other hand, with crying sounds, one is generally more subdued (sympathetic concern) especially when you can hear the distress meaning in the sound. The combined behavioral indicators during these sounds (e.g. lowered posture, shaking, stimulus avoidance) points toward submissive behavior.

In humans, an increase in cortisol and attention is interpreted as a demonstration of
emotional contagion^3,4. This unique pattern of physiological and behavioral responding to crying in our study is most consistent with (a) emotional contagion in dogs, providing first evidence that dogs, like humans, experience a physiological response to human infant crying, and (b) suggests the first clear evidence of cross-species empathy (i.e. canine emotional contagion to human distress).