Dog owners usually know well that their pets can feel their emotions, and they might be right.
A new study reveals that dogs can detect the smallest changes in human breath and sweat associated with their acute psychological stress responses with an accuracy of almost 94%.
Let's find out more!
Fluffy stress detectors
Conducted by researchers from Queen's University, the research explores whether dogs' remarkable sense of smell helps them to sense chemical signals related to their owners' psychological conditions.
The specialists collected breath and sweat samples from people before and after a stress-inducing arithmetic task.
These samples, along with physiological measures (like heart rate and blood pressure), were shown to trained dogs soon after collection.
Dogs were able to accurately find the stress-related smell in 93.76% of trials, surpassing chance levels significantly.
Why it's important
The study highlights the potential for pups to recognize the change in volatile organic compounds emitted by humans during stress, shedding light on the complexity of human-dog relationship and its implications for training anxiety and PTSD service pets that respond to visual cues.
