Can dogs feel empathy?
Can they understand and share our feelings?
Dogs, as we all know, are very good at picking on our emotional temperature. I am sure you can imagine countless examples. If a person is nervous with our dog, our dog can become equally cautious. Or if we are excited, our dog is usually more than happy to join in! If we are ill or hurting, most dog owners will swear their dog is sympathetic to our condition – showing a variety of displacement behaviours. So what’s going on here? Some psychologists and behaviourists maintain this is something called emotional contagion. This implies a dog does respond to our feelings, but without properly understanding them. Simply a good, bad or neutral scale. But can dogs feel empathy ?
Defining Empathy
Defining a term is often easier if we first look at what it isn’t, and we should differentiate it from sympathy. Sympathy is when we do share an emotional connection with someone else’s experience or feeling. But there remains a certain detachment. Empathy is something on a much higher level. It implies an actual understanding of those feelings, and the ability to imagine ourselves in the other being’s emotional skin. It’s much more immersive. It implies the ability to differentiate from self and other. So we are setting the bar quite high, here.
My training is based on an empathic approach – ‘Be Dog’ if you like. To re-imagine ourselves into how a dog truly thinks and feels. So it’s important! But I am curious about the level at which a dog can reciprocate this. Because training is as much about engaging with feelings as it is about auto-responses and simply doing things.
First level biological senses
I got to thinking about this topic from a recent experience. I was laid up with an illness and many of you will recognise my dog’s behaviour with this situation. He stuck by me. He was much closer, more of the time. Now, there are other things going on here. Specifically with illness, there are obviously physical changes in the body. Where these are not immediately obvious to our appearance, from our dog’s point of view, we are still walking around with a big flag. We smell different! Dogs have even been trained to detect certain illnesses with their nose. (I still marvel at this!) But without question, my dog probably knew I had a lurgy well before I showed physical symptoms.
Was his emotional reaction to be closer to me an empathic one though? Sure, there may be other things going on.
Dad is on the sofa during the day. This is weird, I better stay close. Not sure what’s going on. Or…This is nice. He’s not working, it’s good to hang out together. And so on. But most dog parents will tell you, they know, and there is a lot more going on, because we can feel their emotional connection to us.
The mirror test
Some debunk the idea that dogs can feel empathy and distinguish between self and other by using the mirror as an example. But I think this is too crude, and also inconsistent. Most dogs do not seem to react to their reflection in the mirror. A few do though, either displaying prolonged curiosity, or excitement, or even animosity (a belief there is another dog there, or a frustration at not understanding?). But we can never be certain what’s going on in their mind when they see themselves. We could even argue that the majority response of ‘not interested’ means they know exactly what they are seeing, it’s no big deal. Vanity is certainly a concept alien to dogs!
What does the science say?
There have been many studies about this, and they are divided over whether dogs can feel empathy. Because we never know for sure of course. But so many of these studies do hint at the possibility of dogs feeling empathy. Bond Tests (measuring the degree of attachment a dog has to their parent) demonstrate dogs will act with urgency if they feel their owner is in distress. This is a good starting point: emotional contagion for sure. Can we go to a higher level?
For me, one of the most telling studies was by a pair of psychologists. In this experiment, dogs were observed individually in the presence of their parent and also a stranger. The two humans would take turns with different vocalisations, mimicking different emotional levels, such as talking, singing or crying. When the stranger pretended to cry, most of the dogs showed a concern for them. Approaching them, and even licking or muzzling them.
If we are talking about only emotional contagion, we would expect the dogs to possibly mimic the stranger’s behaviour, but approach their owner instead, for comfort. The fact that most chose to try and comfort the stranger instead, suggests evidence of empathic concern.
Mystery and wonder
Maybe some questions can never be answered. But in one sense, the mystery and wonder of dogs’ complex emotional make-up is what is so meaningful to us, rather than how we define truth or fact. I think the answer to the question is Yes. But whatever we believe, embrace the fact that our dog is probably understanding our emotions more than we sometimes give them credit for!