Long ago (~ 1050 AD) in the Western Alps, a monk by the name St. Bernard de Menthon established a monastery to help travelers across the dangerous St. Bernard’s Pass. Roughly 600 years later, the monks of this monastery acquired their first St. Bernard dog; a breed that ultimately became renowned for its ability to sniff out snow-covered travelers. Since then, Lassie, Clifford, the Big Red Dog, and Bolt have permeated our childhoods, fueling our beliefs that dogs can save the day.

How much do we love dogs?

Although most dogs on TV are fictional characters, plenty of real-world accounts exist of dogs helping people. Today, dogs carry many mantles: pets, guide dogs, service dogs, therapy dogs, emotional support dogs, search and rescue dogs, bomb sniffing dogs, drug-sniffing dogs, cancer-detection dogs, seizure-detection dogs, with a list that goes on and on. In fact, the industry of training dogs for these various purposes continues to grow as described in a 2017 study conducted by Walter and colleagues.

In addition to our fascination with the nature and strength of human-dog bonds, our desire to understand the origins of these canine abilities has also increased exponentially (see a review conducted in 2013 by Miles and colleagues). More and more journals are dedicating entire issues to canine cognition and other canine abilities/applications, including the Psychonomic Society’s journal Learning & Behavior, which recently published a special issue on canine cognition.

Questions like – do dogs experience emotional states like jealousy?, or do dogs synchronize their actions with their humans?, or can dogs experience empathy when others are in distress? are prominent in the field of canine cognition. This last question was targeted by Emily Sanford, Emma Burt, and Julia Meyers-Manor in their contribution to the special issue on canine cognition in Learning & Behavior.

What do dogs find distressing?

Research prior to the innovative study by Sanford and colleagues had suggested that dogs responded with distress, both physiologically and behaviorally, to sounds of crying babies, whining humans, and other whining dogs.

Additionally, previous research had also indicated that dogs approached humans (both familiar and unfamiliar) who were crying more than humans who were humming, suggesting the animals engaged an empathic response instead of an ego/self-oriented response. Likewise, dogs will purposefully act to help a person or a dog in need, whether it is to open a door for a human or press a lever so another dog can access a treat.

How do we know dogs are empathic?

Unfortunately, none of these previous studies were able to separate an empathic explanation from other emotional responses. To do so, physiological measures such as heart rate variability (HRV, which measures the fluctuation between heart beats and is reduced when dogs are distressed and generally signals emotional states) can be combined with an experimental prosocial task, such as moving a barrier to reach a crying human vs. a humming human (i.e., the “trapped other”).

This procedure, previously performed only with rats, was used by Sanford and her colleagues to test whether canine empathy was the motivator behind helping behavior in 34 dogs of different breeds, sexes, and roles (e.g., therapy vs. non-therapy).

Dogs and their owners were brought to an unfamiliar room, where the dogs were fitted with a heart rate monitor and their heart rate was recorded for 10 min while their owners were present. The owners were then taken to the room where they were instructed to either hum or cry.  A research assistant took the dog to a connecting room that had a barrier between the owner and the dog that could be pushed open by a dog of any size.

The dogs were given 5 minutes to “help” their humming or crying owner. Help consisted of opening the door, and the experimenters measured how long it took to open the door (and whether it was opened at all).

Following this experience, the dogs were given a series of treat-finding tasks that went from easy to impossible. The impossible task was conducted to measure the bond between the dog and the owner; longer gazes at the owner equaled stronger bonds.

So are dogs empathic?

In this study, 16 out of the 34 dogs opened the door. It did not matter whether they were therapy or non-therapy dogs, young or old, or if their owners were crying out for help or humming (see the figure below which shows the counts for the two conditions).

Moreover, of the door-opening dogs, dogs opened the door faster for their “distressed” owners than dogs who had humming owners. In the distressed condition, the door was opened within 20 seconds on average, compared to nearly 100 seconds for the “humming” control—a fivefold difference.

Although these findings were suggestive of empathy, this differential response was not sufficient to argue that an empathic response was experienced by the dogs. Sanford and colleagues therefore examined other behavioral responses of the animals. Those analyses indicated that dogs that did not open the door displayed more stress behaviors overall than dogs that did open the door during the prosocial task of the “trapped other”. This result is shown in the figure below.

Unfortunately, the results of the physiological measure were less clear. Compared to previous studies, all dogs in this study had much lower HRVs during the baseline period, which was interpreted as a general stress response to the novel environment in which the testing occurred, the separation from their owner, and the novelty of the test itself.  Nonetheless, the HRV response of dogs in the distressed condition did show some increased variability

A final result of interest involved the eye gaze durations during the treat-finding task: recall that after the door-opening task, dogs were led on a series of treat-finding expeditions that ranged from easy to impossible. It turned out that the dogs that opened the doors for their distressed owners gazed longer at their owners during the impossible task than dogs that did not open the door,  suggesting that these dogs may have been motivated by empathy, as compared to the dogs in the control condition. The figure below shows the gaze data.

Overall, the findings of Sanford and colleagues mesh well with a law that was established over a 100 years ago – the Yerkes-Dodson law and the optimal state of arousal. As shown in the figure below, the law holds that a moderate level of stress is associated with peak performances whereas extreme levels of stress (high or low) impair performance for different reasons.

It seems that prosocial behavior, such as helping others, may be subject to this phenomenon as well. When one individual is in distress, this state elicits stress in another individual (human or dog). The potential helper can either take a deep breath and calm down enough to assist, or become so overwhelmed that both individuals are now in need of help (high stress), or so underwhelmed that no help is provided (low stress).

Whatever the situation, it seems that dogs that are strongly attached to their owners are motivated to help their distressed human because of their ability to empathize.

Psychonomics Article focused on in this post:

Sanford, E. M., Burt, E. R., & Meyers-Manor, J. E. (2018). Timmy’s in the well: Empathy and prosocial helping in dogs. Learning & Behavior. DOI: 10.3758/s13420-018-0332-3.