The measurement of non-human animal’s emotions has become more of an interest to researchers for the past decade. There have been many previous studies that evaluate the evolution of animals emotions but, this study explored whether if acoustic sounds can be used to classify emotions or predict the intensity of dog bark sequences. The vocalization of humans an non-human animals have also been studied and it supports that there are some similarities between humans and other animals with their vocalization and perceived emotions (Hantke, Cummins, & Schuller, 2018). Humans’ voices are not the same tone all the time and each tone can express an emotion, so, this begins to propose the question, does the intensity of a dog’s barking correlate to a specific emotion?
This study used only one type of dog breed which was a “Mudi” which is a dog breed from Hungary. They only used one type of dog for accuracy and the dogs were put into seven different situations: alone, ball, fight, food, play, and stranger. In each of the situations, the dog was constricted in some form, except for during food and play. For example, during the alone situation, the dog was tied to a tree while their owner left and during the fight situation, a dog trainer encouraged the dog to be aggressive while the dog was still on a leash. The results show that humans are not the only mammals that can perform different vocalizations or bark frequencies to express their emotions. The dog barked the most when they ate and played with a ball, which can indicate that the dog had an intense emotion of happiness while when the dog was alone or with a stranger the barks became less frequent which could indicate sadness or fear. However, some of the limitations of this would be that only on the type of dog was used so this study is technically only specific to one breed and the participant size was also small which was 12 dogs. Overall, there still needs to be some more extended research on the vocalization of non-human animals and emotions.
This study revealed that humans and dogs demonstrate similar regulations when processing emotions (Hantke, Cummins, & Schuller, 2018). The context in which they set the dogs it would be similar to the way a child would react emotionally. For example, just like the alone scenario, if a child was left alone in public without their guardian they would also indicate that they are sad or in fear. There is a parallel between these scenarios and how humans and dogs react to them emotionally. So, next time your dog is barking or not they might be trying to tell you something.
References:
Hantke, S., Cummins, N., & Schuller, B. (2018). What is my Dog Trying to Tell Me? the Automatic Recognition of the Context and Perceived Emotion of Dog Barks. 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). doi:10.1109/icassp.2018.8461757
Selena Lomeli
November 12, 2018 — 10:03 pm
This is an interesting study. I wonder if this has been found in other breeds of dogs. Also because dogs have evolved socially due to their interactions with humans, I wonder if this communication is a result of that.
Marissa Soto
November 13, 2018 — 1:51 am
Even though this experiment has only been tested on one breed, this correlation makes sense. My dog is a pitbull/lab and she rarely barks. The only time she barks is when guests knock at the door/ring the door bell because she knows what that means. She loves guests, so I know it is her reaction of excitement and happiness. She never barks at people, but she barks at one person and one person only. Every movement the person makes, my dog barks at her, which is not like my dog. So my family and I question why my dog looks at that person as a threat. So I think my dog is trying to tell me something? <– see what I did there. I am not saying I speak dog, but I understand my doggie 🙂 she is smart, and I know her barks mean something.
Anjiya Aswani
November 13, 2018 — 1:17 pm
This looks like an experiment I would conduct for sure! I totally agree with their findings because dogs usually bark or perform an action of any other sort in order to communicate their emotions to the people around them.
Elle Davis
November 14, 2018 — 10:37 am
How interesting! I definitely feel like I can figure out what my dog is trying to communicate by the way she barks or keeps silent sometimes. I’d love to read more about this.
Dennisha King
November 14, 2018 — 3:18 pm
I think that this study is very interesting because although I do not personally own a dog, I have interacted with many dogs through their owners. I have witnessed many instances where I would interact with a dog and someone else would try to interact with the dog and then the dog would bark at them and not me. There are many dog owners that claim that their dogs only bark at certain people which indicate that maybe the dog is picking up on something and trying to communicate. It is also interesting that dogs who would otherwise never bark at their owners, would bark at them if they had on face mask or costume making them slightly unrecognizable or altering what the dog is accustomed to seeing. In comparison to children, this reaction makes sense to pick up on things that they are unfamiliar with by barking at it.
Lizzy Engsberg
November 14, 2018 — 4:20 pm
I really liked your article selection! As a proud dog owner myself, my family and I often joke around about whether or not Maggie is “talking” to us or is trying to use “the force” on us when she’s non-verbally begging for food. It would be interesting to see a larger study that included more breeds of dogs to give the study greater generalizability.
Yasmin Edwards
November 14, 2018 — 4:30 pm
Interesting, I dont have a dog so its cool to know how dogs communicate with humans.