You might be reading your dog’s moods wrong

Many dog owners can tell how their precious pooch is feeling, watching it wag its tail or raise its ears — at least, they think they can.

But people’s perception of canine emotions may be strongly influenced by environmental context around the dog, researchers report March 10 in Anthrozoös.

Animal welfare scientist Holly Molinaro filmed her father interacting with his dog, Oliver, a 14-year-old pointer-beagle mix, in a variety of situations. She filmed the dog in positive ones, such as being played with or praised, and negative ones, such as being around a cat or reprimanded.

Her team then showed edited and unedited footage to 400 college students and asked them questions about how they thought the dog felt.

In the edited footage, the dog appeared on a black background; all environmental context had been removed. On average, participants “couldn’t tell the difference between whether the dog was happy or sad,” says Molinaro, of Arizona State University in Tempe. Only after they watched unedited footage could participants correctly rate the dog’s emotional state.

In a second experiment, the researchers showed another 513 participants edited footage of the dog reacting to a positive situation in a negative context and vice versa, then asked them questions about the dog’s emotional state. For example, Molinaro edited a video so that it looked like Oliver was reacting to a toy (positive situation), while instead he was reacting to a vacuum cleaner (negative situation).

On average, “no matter what the dog was doing, if it was a positive situation, they rated the dog as happy, and if it was a negative situation, they rated the dog as sad,” Molinaro says. That suggests that, at least in this experiment, the participants tended to base their interpretations on the environment around the dog,

Dog cognition researcher Zsófia Virányi says that while she agrees context plays an important role in how people read canine emotions, it’s hard to draw universal conclusions from only one dog.

“Basically, the conclusions that they can form here is not that much about how humans read dog behavior in general, but how humans can read the behavior of this dog in these situations,” says Virányi, of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. Oliver and other dogs with floppy ears, she adds, are much more difficult to read compared with dogs with pointier, more mobile ears.

Still the study raises something to be aware of when trying to interpret a dog’s mood, Molinaro says. Try to rely less on context and more on your furry friend’s body language.