Study Suggests Dog Recognizes and Reacts to human Feelings

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Pet owners are always happy to share a memory about the time their dog responded to their distress by coming to them or trying to get their attention. But those seemed to just be stories, until new research in the journal Learning & Behavior found that dogs really do feel empathy toward their owners.

According to Ripon College psychology professor Julia Meyers-Manor, the research was inspired by her earlier work on empathy in rats.

"One of the challenges we face when we're trying to study empathy is that the idea behind empathy is you are recognizing the emotional states of another individual and responding to it," she told VOA.

The problem is you can't tell why a rat would help another rodent. For example, it might help to free a trapped friend because the other rat is stressed, or the first rat might be just lonely or bored.

"I can't make rats have an emotional state" for an experiment, said Meyers-Manor, "but I can ask humans to adopt an emotional state."