How Your Dog Can Tell How You Feel & How It Affects Their Behavior
Your Scent, Body Language, & Tone of Voice
By Don Hanson, PCBC-A, BFRAP
< A version of this article was published in Pets and Their People on November 7, 2024 >
< A version of this article was published in the SEPT2024 issue of Downeast Dog News>
< Updated 2025-01-27 >
< A short link for this page – https://forcefreepets.com/How-Your-Dog-Can-Tell-How-You-Feel >
One of the most remarkable aspects of dogs is their ability to understand our emotions. They can sense when we are happy, sad, anxious, or angry. I believe that many dogs can “read” the feelings of their family members just as well, if not better, than their closest friends.
The time dogs started living with us is subject to continuing research, but it could be as much as 35,000 years ago [ Toward understanding dog evolutionary and domestication history ]1. The most logical theory about domestication suggests that dogs domesticated themselves when less fearful wolves started hanging around with people because they discovered stealing food from us was safer than chasing down prey. Today, all over the world, feral dogs or village dogs with no owners live a similar life, with people feeding them but not claiming “ownership.”
To survive in close proximity to their most dangerous predator, humans, wolves that evolved into dogs needed to develop the ability to evaluate which humans were safe and which were dangerous. Their survival depended on this skill. Your dog can pick up important clues about how safe you are to be around based on your scent, body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice.
Your Scent Reveals Your Emotions—Your dog’s ability to detect scent is vastly superior to ours. They can follow a scent trail searching for someone lost and detect bedbugs, narcotics, explosives, endangered species, and even cancer by scent.
You may not realize it, but you smell differently when you are relaxed versus when you are experiencing a negative emotion such as anxiety-fear-terror or frustration-anger-rage. In humans, these emotional scents can cause anxiety as well as affect cognition and decision-making in others. A recent study determined that your dog can also detect your emotional state based on your scent, and it will affect their behavior and could negatively affect their welfare. [ The odour of an unfamiliar stressed or relaxed person affects dogs’ responses to a cognitive bias test ]2 If your dog determines you are in a negative emotional state (fearful or angry) based on your scent, they may avoid you and shut down during training,
Body Language and Facial Expressions—Our facial expressions are an automatic response to physiological stimuli, and we may not be aware we are smiling or frowning. However, dogs have gotten very good at looking at our faces to determine if we are safe or dangerous. A pair of studies [ Decoding Human Emotional Faces in the Dog’s Brain ]3 [ Dogs can discriminate human smiling faces from blank expressions ]4 determined that dogs could recognize a smiling face and assess whether we are happy, sad, angry, or fearful by looking at our faces. That’s why if you look like either of these people, you probably also are giving off an odor that says “not safe,” which gives your dog two reasons to stay away from you. If you’re unsure what you look like when stressed, use your mobile phone to take selfies, and you might discover why your dog and even some people stay away from you at certain times.
The Tone of Your Voice—If you took a dog to a training class in the 70s or, sadly, even today, you may have been told to use a deep, gruff voice when speaking to your dog so that they will respect and obey you. Most dog behavior and training professionals had empirically known what a recent study [ Dog brains are sensitive to infant- and dog-directed prosody ]5 has confirmed. The speech sensitivity of a dog’s brain is more pronounced when the speakers were women who used variations in pitch, loudness, tempo, and rhythm in their speech like they might when talking to an infant. Guys, when I was a mere student in the 1990s, I didn’t want to believe this either, but it is absolutely true! If you increase the pitch of your voice, your dog will be more likely to respond.
While not part of the study above, I think we also need to be aware of how saying certain “negative” words affects what we communicate with both our face and voice. Saying “No,” “Stop That,” and even “Leave It” can sound harsh and mean and make our faces look scary. It may also cause our scent to change as we go into anger, a negative emotional state.
For the benefit of you and your dog, please ensure you are smiling inside and outside when interacting, especially when training.
References
1 Galibert, F., Quignon, P., Hitte, C., & André, C. (2011). Toward understanding dog evolutionary and domestication history. Comptes Rendus Biologies, 334(3), 190-196. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crvi.2010.12.011
2 Parr-Cortes, Z., Müller, C.T., Talas, L. et al. The odour of an unfamiliar stressed or relaxed person affects dogs’ responses to a cognitive bias test. Sci Rep 14, 15843 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-66147-1
3 Hernández-Pérez,, Raúl, Concha, Luis, Cuaya, Laura V. Decoding Human Emotional Faces in the Dog’s Brain. bioRxiv 134080; doi: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/134080v2.full.pdf
4 Nagasawa, M., Murai, K., Mogi, K. et al. Dogs can discriminate human smiling faces from blank expressions. Anim Cogn 14, 525–533 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-011-0386-5
5 Gergely, A., Gábor, A., Gácsi, M. et al. Dog brains are sensitive to infant- and dog-directed prosody. Commun Biol 6, 859 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-023-05217-y