Your stress levels affect your dog, reveals study

By Aoife Byrne and Gareth Arnott for The Conversation

Nottingham: Dogs have lived alongside humans for thousands of years. They have been used to hunt, guard, herd and perform many other tasks, but today they mainly act as companions. While their lives today may seem easy compared with their ancestors, they still face many stresses – including visits to the vet.

A couple of years ago, researchers in France showed that how a dog owner behaves at the vet affects their pet’s stress levels. The study showed that negative owner behaviour, such as scolding, increased dog anxiety during a veterinary examination.

But before our recent research at Queen’s University Belfast, no one had investigated the effect of owner stress on their dogs in a controlled environment. Our study differs from the research above, as it looks specifically at the effect of owner stress, measured through heart rate changes, on the stress experienced by their dog when at a vet.

Twenty-eight owners and their dogs took part in our experiment. Both owners and dogs wore heart-rate monitors throughout the experiment so that we could monitor and record their heart rate and heart-rate variability – to measure stress levels.

We then exposed the owners to either a stressful or a stress-relieving intervention and monitored the effect it had on them as well as on their dogs. The stressful intervention consisted of a digital stress test, which required owners to perform a mental arithmetic task, as well as a verbal presentation task. The stress-relieving intervention was a five-minute guided breathing meditation video.

We found that dogs’ heart rates decreased as they got used to the veterinary clinic environment. This suggests that vets should give dogs time to get used to the clinic before examining them. Not only will this reduce their stress, it may also improve the validity of any examinations or tests performed, as measures such as heart and respiratory rates can be elevated as a result of heightened stress.

Emotional contagion

We also found that changes in the owner’s heart rate from before the experiment to during the experiment could predict the heart rate changes of their dog. If the owner’s heart rate increased or decreased during the experiment, their dog’s heart rate was also likely to increase or decrease in tandem.

These results suggest that dogs may recognise stress in their owners, and this could influence their own stress levels, through the process of “emotional contagion”. This is a phenomenon where people, and other animals, may “catch” or mimic the emotions and behaviour of those around them, either consciously or unconsciously.

It may also indicate that dogs look to their owners to inform their response to new environments. Owners were asked not to interact with their dogs for the duration of the experiment. So any assessment of owner stress made by their dogs was done without direct communication between owner and pet.

So what does this mean for the average dog owner? If our stress has the potential to influence our dogs, then this should be considered when we visit the vet. If vets help owners feel more calm while attending the clinic, it could help their dogs feel more at ease, too.

A holistic approach to veterinary care, where the animal, their owner and the environment are all taken into consideration, is likely to result in the best welfare outcomes.

While our research primarily focused on the bond between dogs and their owners, a recent study investigating canine behaviour found that the smell of sweat from a stressed human, who was unfamiliar to the dog, affected the learning and cognition of that dog during a cognitive bias test. The test measures whether an animal is in a positive or negative emotional state, and whether they are likely to make decisions with an optimistic or pessimistic outlook. This shows that dogs may be affected by the stress of strangers, as well as that of their owners.

What is clear from our latest research is that dogs are perceptive animals that are influenced by the world and the people around them. People caring for or working with dogs should bear in mind that their own stress may affect that of their dogs.

(Aoife Byrne is a PhD Candidate, Animal Behaviour and Welfare, University of Nottingham, and Gareth Arnott, Lecturer in Animal Behaviour and Welfare, Queen's University Belfast)