• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Psychology Spot

All About Psychology

  • About
  • Psychology Topics
  • Advertising
Home » Can your dog know if you are stressed?

Can your dog know if you are stressed?

dogs can smell stress in humans

For most people, dogs are a member of the family. Although we do not speak the same language, living together allows us to overcome that distance and facilitates communication with our furry friends. They don’t need to speak to make us understand what they want or how they feel, and it seems that dogs can also understand us quite well without using words.

The deep connection between dogs and their human family

Researchers at Queens University Belfast have found that dogs can indeed detect stress in humans. In fact, stress is not merely an emotional response, but also triggers multiple changes at the physiological level.

It can increase your heart rate and blood pressure, cause dizziness and shortness of breath due to the release of hormones like epinephrine and cortisol into your bloodstream. These changes also cause us to produce different types of volatile organic compounds through our breath and skin, generating what has been called the “anxiety smell”.

Therefore, if we emit a characteristic odor when we are stressed or anxious, it would not be unreasonable to think that dogs can smell it. In fact, owners of dogs trained to give medical alarm have reported that stress is the condition that most often alerts their pets.

Dogs are also known to be able to perceive human feelings and emotions through sound and sight. Researchers at the Karolinska Institute even found that they suffer from emotional contagion, reflecting the mood of their owners, and that their blood cortisol levels can be similar to those of the owners.

These are not extraordinary findings if we take into account that the relationship between a dog and its owner is functionally similar to that between parents and children, presenting similarities of a behavioral and neuroendocrine nature.

Dogs detect stress through smell

Since the sense of smell is essential for dogs and helps them understand the environment around them, the researchers wondered if they would be able to detect and respond to changes in human physiology associated with a psychological state, such as stress, simply by identifying changes in human body odor.

This study asked if dogs could discriminate between different levels of these volatile organic compounds. Therefore, the researchers took breath and sweat samples from 30 participants, both from the owners of the dogs participating in the research and strangers, while they were in a neutral mood or felt stressed due to an experimentally induced psychological threat.

Each dog participated in 20 discrimination trials, in which they consistently made consistent and accurate choices. Precisely, they detected the stress sample 94.44% of the time, almost always at the first exposure.

It should be noted that dogs have 220 million olfactory receptors, compared to 50 million in humans, so they are particularly effective at differentiating and identifying odors that go unnoticed for us. Therefore, it is not surprising that they are able to identify the volatile organic compounds that we release when we are stressed and respond accordingly. So now you know, when you get stressed, your pet notices it and chances are that he or she will get stressed too.

Sources:

Wilson, C. et. Al. (2022) Dogs can discriminate between human baseline and psychological stress condition odours. PlosOne; 10.1371.

Petersson, M. et. Al. (2017) Oxytocin and Cortisol Levels in Dog Owners and Their Dogs Are Associated with Behavioral Patterns: An Exploratory Study. Frontiers in Psychology; 10.3389.

Share this post

Share on Facebook Share on X (Twitter) Share on LinkedIn Share on Email Share on Reddit Share on WhatsApp Share on Telegram

Jennifer Delgado

Psychologist Jennifer Delgado

I am a psychologist and I spent several years writing articles for scientific journals specialized in Health and Psychology. I want to help you create great experiences. Learn more about me.

No, young children do not try to manipulate their parents

27/09/2023 By Jennifer Delgado

The 3 rules of the Stoics to overcome regret

25/09/2023 By Jennifer Delgado

A spiritual retreat to find your balance

20/09/2023 By Jennifer Delgado

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • No, young children do not try to manipulate their parents
  • The 3 rules of the Stoics to overcome regret
  • A spiritual retreat to find your balance
  • The ideal time to make a negative criticism and have it accepted
  • Akrasia Effect: Why don’t we do what we propose ourselves?

What I’m reading…

DON’T MISS THE LATEST POSTS

Footer

Keep Learning

How many hugs do we need a day • Movies about anxiety • Psychological movies • Free spirit • Dancing makes me happy • Intelligence is inherited from mothers • People who talk too much • Vagus nerve and anxiety • Learned helplessness • Movies about depression • What is empathy • List of emotions • Law of detachment • Comfort zone • Quotes about being different • Old soul • Martyr complex • Types of narcissism • Defense mechanisms • Bitter person • Pseudo conflicts

About

Blog of Psychology, curiosities, research and articles about personal growth and to understand how our mind works. Also in Italian and Spanish.

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Cookie Policy · Disclaimer and Privacy Policy · Advertising