In this task, the dog learns to tip over a jar to get to a treat then we lock the jar onto a board with a treat inside and record whether the dog gazes at its owner or a stranger. Next, we turned to a test called the Impossible Task to learn a bit more about each dog’s emotional bond with its person. Helping requires more than just empathyīecause both humans and animals tend to be more empathetic toward individuals with whom they are more familiar or close, we thought that the strength of a dog’s bond with its owner might explain some of the differences we saw in dogs’ empathetic responses.Īs soon as the test was over, we let the dog and owner reunite and cuddle for a few minutes to make sure everyone was calm before the next part of the experiment. This may mean that dogs who opened in the humming condition were seeking their owners for their own comfort. In contrast, dogs in the humming condition showed a slight tendency to open more quickly if they were reported to be more anxious. We also found that dogs that opened the door more quickly were less stressed than dogs that took longer to open it. In the crying condition, we found the dogs that opened the door showed fewer signs of stress – and were reported by their owners to be less anxious – than dogs that did not open it. Other interesting results came when we looked into how the dogs were behaving in each condition. We did not find any differences between therapy dogs and other pet dogs. The humans’ crying seemed to affect the dogs’ behaviors, taking just a quarter as long to push open the door and get to their human if they seemed distressed. When we looked at how quickly the dogs who opened the door did so, we found a stark difference: In the crying condition, dogs took an average of 23 seconds to open the door, while in the control condition, they took more than a minute and a half. Surprisingly, that isn’t what we found: About half the dogs opened the door, regardless of which condition they were in, which tells us that dogs in both conditions wanted to be near their owners. We expected to find that dogs would open the door more often if their owner was crying than if they were humming. It seemed like dogs would be capable of nudging open a door to access their owners. So we adapted this straightforward task from previous research in rats. Past research seemed to indicate that dogs would not help their human companions in distress, but it’s possible that the tasks to demonstrate “help” were too difficult for a dog to understand. We ran the test until the dog opened the door or, if it didn’t, until five minutes elapsed. The other half of our volunteers we assigned to hum “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and say “Help” in a calm voice every 15 seconds. We assigned half the people to cry loudly and say “Help” in a distressed voice every 15 seconds. Each owner sat in a chair behind a clear door that was magnetized shut – there as a barrier separating the dog from its owner – that the dog could easily push open. Next, we instructed the owner on how to behave during the experiment.
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