Dataset Information

Dogs' social referencing towards owners and strangers.

ABSTRACT: Social referencing is a process whereby an individual uses the emotional information provided by an informant about a novel object/stimulus to guide his/her own future behaviour towards it. In this study adult dogs were tested in a social referencing paradigm involving a potentially scary object with either their owner or a stranger acting as the informant and delivering either a positive or negative emotional message. The aim was to evaluate the influence of the informant's identity on the dogs' referential looking behaviour and behavioural regulation when the message was delivered using only vocal and facial emotional expressions. Results show that most dogs looked referentially at the informant, regardless of his/her identity. Furthermore, when the owner acted as the informant dogs that received a positive emotional message changed their behaviour, looking at him/her more often and spending more time approaching the object and close to it; conversely, dogs that were given a negative message took longer to approach the object and to interact with it. Fewer differences in the dog's behaviour emerged when the informant was the stranger, suggesting that the dog-informant relationship may influence the dog's behavioural regulation. Results are discussed in relation to studies on human-dog communication, attachment, mood modification and joint attention.

SUBMITTER: Merola I

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3469536 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Dogs' social referencing towards owners and strangers.

Merola Isabella I Prato-Previde Emanuela E Marshall-Pescini Sarah S

PloS one 20121011 10

Social referencing is a process whereby an individual uses the emotional information provided by an informant about a novel object/stimulus to guide his/her own future behaviour towards it. In this study adult dogs were tested in a social referencing paradigm involving a potentially scary object with either their owner or a stranger acting as the informant and delivering either a positive or negative emotional message. The aim was to evaluate the influence of the informant's identity on the dogs ...[more]

PMID: 23071828

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Project description:Pro-social behaviors are defined as voluntary actions that benefit others. Comparative studies have mostly focused on investigating the presence of pro-sociality across species in an intraspecific context. Taken together, results on both primates and non-primate species indicate that reliance on cooperation may be at work in the selection and maintenance of pro-social sentiments. Dogs appear to be the ideal model when investigating a species' propensity for pro-sociality in an interspecific context because it has been suggested that as a consequence of domestication, they evolved an underlying temperament encouraging greater propensity to cooperate with human partners. In a recent study, using a food delivery paradigm, dogs were shown to preferentially express pro-social choices toward familiar compared to unfamiliar conspecifics. Using the same set-up and methods in the current study, we investigated dogs' pro-social preferences toward familiar and unfamiliar human partners. We found that dogs' pro-social tendencies did not extend to humans and the identity of the human partners did not influence the rate of food delivery. Interestingly, dogs tested with their human partners spent more time gazing at humans, and did so for longer after food consumption had ended than dogs tested with conspecific partners in the initial study. To allow comparability between results from dogs tested with a conspecific and a human partner, the latter were asked not to communicate with dogs in any way. However, this lack of communication from the human may have been aversive to dogs, leading them to cease performing the task earlier compared to the dogs paired with familiar conspecifics in the prior study. This is in line with previous findings suggesting that human communication in such contexts highly affects dogs' responses. Consequently, we encourage further studies to examine dogs' pro-social behavior toward humans taking into consideration their potential responses both with and without human communication.

Project description:Background: Various health benefits from the ownership of companion dogs have been studied from a One Health perspective. However, the preventive effects on depression are unclear, with inconsistent results across studies. We hypothesized that heterogeneity among owners would be related to the mixed results. Specifically, the difference in the strength of the bond between the owners and their companion dogs would modify the effect of dog ownership. As an exploratory study, we compared the depression symptoms of the owners with favorable attitudes toward their dogs, with those of the owners with unfavorable attitudes, to investigate the potential effect modification of owners' attitudes on the association between the ownership and depression symptom. Methods: We conducted a web-based questionnaire survey of 654 19- to 39-year-old adults who had companion dogs in Seoul, South Korea, where a major health burden is depression among young adults. We measured the owners' attitudes toward their dogs using the modified Pet Attitude Scale (PAS-M) and their depression symptoms using the short version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies depression scale (CESD-10). Demographic and socioeconomic factors were measured to adjust for the association between attitude and depression symptoms. Multivariate logistic regression models were used in this study. Results: The owners who had less favorable attitudes toward their dogs (lower PAS-M scores) tended to have depression symptoms. The direction and significance were maintained either when the PAS-M variable was used as a continuous variable (odds ratio (OR) for one score increase in PAS-M was 0.95 (95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.94-0.96)) or as a categorical variable (OR for lower PAS-M was 3.19 (95% CI = 2.28 -4.47)). Conclusion: We found a positive significant association between owners' depression symptoms and unfavorable attitudes toward their dogs, although causal direction could not be determined. Future studies should investigate the potential causal link.

Dataset Information

Dogs' social referencing towards owners and strangers.

Publications

Dogs' social referencing towards owners and strangers.

Similar Datasets

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