• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Dogs Can Smell When People Are Stressed, New Study Confirms

September 28, 2022 by Deborah Bloomfield

Your dog can tell when you’re feeling stressed because you smell different, new research has revealed. So strong is the stench of human worry that the dogs in the study could correctly distinguish between relaxed and stressed odors in 93.75 percent of trials, even when the person involved was a complete stranger.

Researchers recruited four dogs from Belfast in Northern Ireland. Named Treo, Fingal, Soot, and Winnie, the science puppers consisted of one cocker spaniel, one cockapoo, a lurcher-type mixed breed, and a terrier-type mix.

Advertisement

Sweat and breath samples were collected from 36 human participants before and after attempting a fast-paced math problem, with increases in blood pressure and heart rate providing confirmation of elevated stress levels following completion of the task. The four scholarly pooches were then trained to distinguish between baseline and stressed-out samples, identifying the latter by holding their nose close to the sample for five seconds.

Overall, the four dogs correctly discerned the smell of stress in 675 out of 720 trials, with the performance of individual dogs ranging from 90 to 96.88 percent accuracy.

“The findings show that we, as humans, produce different smells through our sweat and breath when we are stressed and dogs can tell this apart from our smell when relaxed – even if it is someone they do not know,” explained study author Clara Wilson in a statement. 

Advertisement

According to the researchers, the dogs may have been able to detect the smell of stress hormones like cortisol. They also explain that stress leads to “the stimulation of gluconeogenesis, glycogenolysis, and lipolysis, and increased levels of renin and angiotensin II enzyme,” all of which may also be apparent to dogs.

“The research highlights that dogs do not need visual or audio cues to pick up on human stress,” adds Wilson. “This is the first study of its kind and it provides evidence that dogs can smell stress from breath and sweat alone, which could be useful when training service dogs and therapy dogs.”

“It also helps to shed more light on the human-dog relationship and adds to our understanding of how dogs may interpret and interact with human psychological states,” she said.

Advertisement

The researchers say that future studies may provide greater insights into “emotional contagion” whereby dogs mirror the affective state of their owners. Though the current study did not assess the dogs’ emotional responses to human stress, the authors note that the pets generally became happily excited when they detected these samples, as they came to expect a food reward for a correct alert.

Overall, they say that their findings “could have further applications to the training of anxiety and PTSD service dogs, that are, currently, predominantly trained to respond to visual cues.”

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. SoftBank’s latest proptech bet is leading Pacaso’s $125M Series C
  2. China’s industrial profit growth slows for sixth month in Aug
  3. Left or right, German election leaves investors braced for more spending
  4. Soccer-Premier League clubs demand emergency meeting over Newcastle takeover

Source Link: Dogs Can Smell When People Are Stressed, New Study Confirms

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • What Did Neanderthals Sound Like?
  • One Star System Could Soon Dazzle Us Twice With Nova And Supernova Explosions
  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version