Can Dogs Smell the Emotions of Other Dogs? |
Dogs are sensitive to the visual and auditory signals that indicate the emotional state of other dogs nearby.
Dogs exposed to an unchanging emotional odor become habituated and no longer pay attention to it.
If the new scent changes the dog’s behavior in the expected way, he is recognizing its emotional content.
Dogs are highly social animals, responding to various communication signals from humans and other dogs. Perhaps the most important signals are those that communicate the emotional state of the individuals around them. It is well-established that dogs respond to visually observable changes in the body posture of other dogs—specific tail wags, flattening ears, among other behaviors—as well as their vocal signals (growls, whimpers). But beyond sight and sound are there other channels of emotional information available to dogs?
An acquaintance contacted me because she was baffled by a recent event. Once every few weeks, she gets together with a friend of hers who owns a littermate of her Shetland Sheepdog, Rolf, so the two dogs can play together, and the two women can have coffee and have a friendly chat. According to her, “When Sharon brought Rufus [her dog] into my living room yesterday, his tail drooped, his ears went down, and he actually whimpered and looked uncomfortable. He is normally very friendly and upbeat, and he’d been to my house many times. It wasn’t as though Rolf was doing anything unpleasant or threatening since he was out in the backyard at that moment. I really can’t figure out what made him so uncomfortable.”
I pressed her for a bit more information, and she told me that an hour or so before Rufus arrived, she had been grooming Rolf in that room and working out some tangles in his long fur. The dog found this interaction to be unpleasant because of the occasional hard tugs required to free some of the knots. At that moment, I remembered a very recent report just released by Alice Wang and Alexandra Horowitz from the Dog Cognition Lab at the Department of Psychology at Barnard College in New York City. It seemed to me that this research contained a clue.
Dr. Horowitz’s lab has done remarkable work exploring the sense of smell in dogs, even establishing that dogs can use scent to determine the passage of time. The lab’s latest report suggests that dogs can also smell and identify other dogs' emotions.
Collecting Emotional Odors
Research like this has to be done in stages. The first stage involves determining whether dogs can detect differences in the chemical scents produced by different emotional states, regardless of whether they understand that these different odors categorize specific emotions.
The first step is collecting smells associated with identifiable emotional states. This was done by exposing a dog to specific situations likely related to joy, stress, and a neutral state. Joy was triggered by a short, happy play session involving retrieving a ball. Stress resulted from a short nail-trimming procedure. A neutral baseline was represented by the dog resting.
Following each specific behavioral event, odors were collected using sterile cotton pads by rubbing the inside of the dog’s mouth, footpads, and the area near the anus. The scented pads were later cut up and stored in freezer packs for later use.
Do Dogs Recognize Different Emotional Odors?
The technique to determine whether a dog recognizes a particular scent as being different from another is called a habituation-discrimination paradigm. It involves presenting the dog with the same odor over a period. After a short while, the dog becomes habituated to that smell (bored and no longer paying attention). Next, a pad with a different emotional odor is presented. If the dog cannot tell the difference between the first and second scent, he will ignore the new one since it doesn’t seem to vary from the already familiar one; however, if he recognizes that it is different (that something has changed), he will start sniffing again. And this is what happened here. A sample of 43 dogs indicated that they could distinguish between joy and stress odors as well as the baseline.
Do the Dogs Know That These Smells Represent Emotions?
The data make it clear that the dogs can recognize the differences between particular body odors; however, do dogs associate them with different emotional states? To determine this, the researchers videotaped the test sessions and then scored the dog’s actual behaviors when exposed to the emotional odors.
Specifically, the researchers were looking for changes in body posture used to signal emotions. For instance, if they are feeling stressed, dogs will tend to flatten their ears, lick their noses, yawn, tuck their tails, and also show other behaviors such as staying close to their owner and avoiding strangers. These are distinct from joy-related behaviors, which include tail wagging, play bows, relaxed open-mouthed expression, leisurely exploring the area away from their owner, and approaching strangers.
The results were clear: not only did the dog recognize odor differences associated with emotional states from other dogs, but also reacted to them appropriately with more hesitancy and trepidation when they encountered a canine stress odor and much more relaxed behavior when the area was filled with another dog’s joyful odors.
This set of results solves the puzzle of why Rufus suddenly seemed nervous entering a familiar room. Another dog had previously filled the area with relatively stressful odors because his grooming session involved the unpleasant untangling of knots in his fur. His emotional state produced those odors, which persisted even after the dog had left the room and were now perceptible to the visiting dog.
Dogs use their acute sense of smell to detect odors linked to the emotions of other dogs; they can also perceive the emotional states of other dogs in locations previously occupied by them.
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Wang A. & Horowitz A. (2026). Dogs (Canis familiaris) distinguish conspecific emotional chemosignals. Scientific Reports.
Horowitz, A. & Franks, B. (2020). What smells? Gauging attention to olfaction in canine cognition research. Animal Cognition. 23, 11–18;
Coren, S. (2001). How to speak dog: Mastering the art of dog-human communication. New York: Fireside Books, Simon & Schuster (pp. i-xii, 1-274).
Horowitz, A. (2017). Being a Dog: Following the Dog into a World of Smell, Scribner: New York, pp. 336
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