Humans can determine a dog’s mood by the sound of its growl, scientists have found, with women showing greater ability than men.
While previous studies have found that humans can unpick the context of barks, the latest study investigated whether the same was true of canine grumbles, with some previous research suggesting humans struggle to differentiate between playful and aggressive vocalizations.
“It is an important thing that humans are capable [of recognizing] the emotional state of another species just based on the vocal characteristics,” said Tamas Farago first author of the study from Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary.
Photo: EPA/KRZYSZTOF SWIDERSKI
To tackle the conundrum, Faragoand colleagues used previously captured recordings of 18 dogs growling in three contexts: guarding food from other dogs, playing tug-of-war with humans, and being threatened by the approach of a stranger. The researchers monitored several features, including the length of each growl and its frequency.
Two sets of the recordings, which included two growls from each context, were played to 40 adults. Each participant was asked to record their impression of the first set of growls on a sliding scale, rating their perception of the dog for five emotions: fear, aggression, despair, happiness and playfulness.
For the second set of recordings, each participant was asked to choose the context of the growl from three options: food guarding, responding to a threat, and play.
The results, published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, show that participants were able to identify on canine emotions, with growls relating to food guarding deemed the most aggressive, and those recorded during play rated higher in playfulness and happiness and lower in fearfulness and despair.
Analysis of the growls revealed that features such as duration, rhythm and pitch appeared to offer clues about the dog’s mood.
“[The participants] had no idea about the actual context of the growl, they just heard the growl and then based on the acoustic structure they could rate it as a happy growl [for example],” Farago said.
Participants were able to correctly classify 81 percent of play growls, 60 percent of the food growls and 50 percent of the threatening growls, with further analysis revealing that often the latter two were confused.
What’s more, the team found that women and dog owners of either sex were better at the task.
“It is known that women have a higher emotional sensitivity, and probably this higher sensitivity can help to differentiate better the context of the growls,” the authors write.
The study concludes that humans are not only able to match emotions to growls, but also to figure out their context.
Holly Root-Gutteridge, an expert in animal communications from the University of Sussex, who was not involved in the research, said the study was an interesting step towards decoding dog communication. The research sheds light on one of the big questions in the field: whether humans are as good at understanding dogs as they are at understanding us.
She said the finding that humans were poorer at telling apart food guarding and threatening-scenario growls from playful ones “is interesting as it means humans recognize the broad context of a growl but may not parse the niceties of defensive versus aggressive threats as well. The results concur with earlier ones that longer growls are more aggressive and that there are audible differences between a ‘let’s play’ happy growl and a ‘my bone, leave it’ defensive one.
“Learning about these differences may help in reducing dog aggression towards humans, as well as improving dogs’ behavior, as we understand better when a threat is real versus playful.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would