Think you understand your dog? Think again

Dogs cannot talk, but their body language speaks volumes. Many dogs will bow when they want to play, for instance, or lick their lips and avert their gaze when nervous or afraid.

- Emily Anthes

NEW YORK - Dogs cannot talk, but their body language speaks volumes. Many dogs will bow when they want to play, for instance, or lick their lips and avert their gaze when nervous or afraid.

But people are not always good at interpreting such cues or even noticing them, a new study suggests.

In the study, the researchers presented people with videos of a dog reacting to positive and negative stimuli, including a leash, a treat, a vacuum cleaner and a scolding.

Asked to assess the dog's emotions, viewers seemed to pay more attention to the situational cues than the dog's actual behaviour, even when the videos had been edited to be deliberately misleading.

In one video, for instance, a dog that appeared to be reacting to the sight of his leash had actually been shown a vacuum cleaner by his owner.

"When it comes to just perceiving dog emotions, we think we know what's happening, but we're actually subconsciously relying on a lot of other factors," said Ms Holly Molinaro, a doctoral student at Arizona State University and the first author of the new paper, which was published in the journal Anthrozoos on March 10.

That bias could mislead owners about their dogs' well-being, she said. People who want to be attentive to their dog's experiences and emotions need to "take a second or two to actually focus on the dog rather than everything else that's going on", she added.