Autonomic nervous system responses of dogs to human-dog interaction videos

PLoS One. 2022 Nov 3;17(11):e0257788. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0257788. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

We examined whether dogs show emotional response to social stimuli played on videos. Secondary, we hypothesized that if dogs recognize themselves in videos, they will show a different emotional response to videos of self and other dogs. We compared heart rate variability among four video stimuli: a video of the owner ignoring another dog (OW-A-IGN), a video of a non-owner interacting with another dog (NOW-A-INT), a video of the owner interacting with another dog (OW-A-INT), and a video of the owner interacting with the dog subject (OW-S-INT). The results showed that root mean square of the difference between adjacent R-R Intervals (RMSSD) and standard deviation of the R-R Interval (SDNN) were lower in NOW-A-INT and OW-S-INT than in OW-A-IGN. There was no statistical difference in the responses to OW-S-INT and OW-A-INT, suggesting that dogs did not distinguish themselves and other dogs in videos. On the other hand, the difference in mean R-R Interval between OW-S-INT and OW-A-INT showed positive correlation with the score of attachment or attention-seeking behavior. Therefore, this study does not completely rule out self-recognition in dogs and there remains the possibility that the more attached a dog to its owner, the more distinct the dog's emotional response to the difference between the self-video stimulus and the video stimulus of another dog. Further studies are needed to clarify this possibility.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Autonomic Nervous System*
  • Dogs
  • Emotions* / physiology
  • Heart Rate / physiology
  • Humans

Grants and funding

This study was financially supported by the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas (No. 15K21739), Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) (No. 19H00972), Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Research (Exploratory) (No. 19K22823) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and JST, CREST Grant Number JPMJCR22P2, Japan. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.