Dogs feel your pain

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Open wide. Dogs yawn when they hearus yawn.

Credit: Joyce Marrero/Shutterstock

Yawn next to your dog, and she may do the same. Though it seemssimple, this contagious behavior is actually quite remarkable: Only a fewanimals do it, and only dogs cross the species barrier. Now a new studyfinds that dogs yawn even when they only hear the sound of us yawning,the strongest evidence yet that canines may be able to empathize with us.

Besides people and dogs, contagious yawning has been observed ingelada baboons, stump-tail macaques, and chimpanzees. Humans tend toyawn more with friends and acquaintances, suggesting that "catching"someone's yawn may be tied to feelings of empathy. Similarly, somestudies have found that dogs tend to yawn more after watching familiarpeople yawning. But it is unclear whether the canine behavior is linked toempathy as it is in people. One clue might be if even the mere sound of ahuman yawn elicited yawning in dogs.

To that end, scientists at the University of Porto in Portugal recruited 29 dogs, all of whom had lived for at least 6months with their owners. To reduce anxiety, the study was performed in familiar rooms in the dogs' homes and inthe presence of a known person but with no visual contact with their owners.

The team, led by behavioral biologist Karine Silva, recorded yawning sounds of the dogs' owners and an unfamiliarwoman as well as an artificial control sound consisting of a computer-reversed yawn. (To help induce naturalyawning, volunteers listened to an audio loop of prerecorded yawns over headphones.) Each dog heard all of thesounds in two sessions, each carried out 7 days apart. During the sessions, the researchers measured the numberof elicited yawns in dogs in response to sounds from known and unknown people.

As the team will report in the July issue of Animal Cognition, 12 out of 29 dogs yawned during the experiment. Onaverage, canines yawned five times more often when they heard humans they knew yawning as opposed to controlsounds. "These results suggest that dogs have the capacity to empathize with humans," says Silva.

That's not surprising, she says. People first began domesticating dogs at least 15,000 years ago, and since thenwe've bred them to perform increasingly complex tasks, from hunting to guiding the blind. This close relationshipmay have fostered cross-species empathy over the millennia.

"This study tells us something new about the mechanisms underlying contagious yawning in dogs," says EvanMcLean, a Ph.D. student at Duke University's Canine Cognition Center in Durham, North Carolina, who was not partof the study. "As in humans, dogs can catch this behavior using their ears alone." Still, he notes, the experimentsdon't tell us much about the nature of empathy in dogs. "Do they think about our emotions and internal states theway we do as humans?"

Ádám Miklósi, an ethologist at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, agrees. "Using behaviors as indicators willonly show some similarity in behavior," he says, "but it will never tell us whether canine empathy, whatever this is,matches human empathy." Previous work has shown, for example, that when dogs look guilty, they may not actuallybe feeling guilty. "Dogs can simulate very well different forms of social interest that could mislead people to thinkthey are controlled by the same mental processes," says Miklósi, "but they may not always understand thecomplexity of human behavior."

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Dogs Feel Your Painby Zuberoa Marcos on 7 May 2012, 4:32 PM | 20 Comments

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Peter Croft • 11 months agoMy dog, a 13 yo female Golden Labrador, is not a dog which seeks attention. She likes tobe stroked but usually is content to stay outside. She especially won't sleep in my bedroom withme. Apart from during thunderstorms, she won't enter. Being so old, she has tumours and isprobably nearing the time when I'll have to take her on the last ride, and it's breaking me up.

A few months ago I was resting on my bed in the daytime and silently crying as I thought aboutwhat I'll have to do. Tears were streaming, I can tell you. I heard her moving around and then shecame into my room and stood by my bed, looking for a cuddle. This is unheard of. She had neverdone this before. I can only guess that she sensed my pain. I love that dog dearly.

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Maria Luisa Sponga • 11 months agoIf you have ever had a dog in your home, you have no doubt that a dog feels empathy withyou.

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Rosebud • a month agoI've read that yawning is contagious, not for "socialization" reasons...but as an innatesurvival instinct. Yawning is stimulated by a lower level of Oxygen, whether from low levels in ourenvironment, or simply because we are tired and breathing in a more shallow manner. When onecreature sees another creature yawn, a signal/ red flag is sent to our brains that alerts the brain to apossible "problem' in the immediate area, ie) an inadequate supply of Oxygen. That, in turn, causesthe creature to yawn, which, essentially, is an exaggerated breath, causing the body to pull in moreOxygen.

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Kitty Girl • 11 months agoI have had two domesticated cats one male and one female. I was very close with the twoas they were inside pets. They both would yawn when I yawned and I noticed this. I would fake ayawn being silent, and they would yawn. They didn't have to hear the yawn, they would only see itsometimes. I would test them often and they yawned with a sound or without it didn't matter.

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Rogue Biologist • 11 months agoDogs have been shown to pay attention to human cues to a much greater extent thanwolves even mother-reared feral dogs, so I would not expect wolves to respond to humanbehaviors in the same way as dogs. This could either be a result of selective breeding of dogs overtime, an initial trait that predisposed the dog's wild canid ancestor to be domesticated, or mostlikely a combination of the two. Dogs also use yawns for different things than humans do, and adog will often yawn to indicated and diffuse tension (as Elnuar has already posted). It may be thatthat was the consideration of your internal state that lead the authors to label this as empathy.

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edwin rutsch • 11 months agoMay I suggest a further resource to learn more about empathy and compassion.The Center for Building a Culture of EmpathyThe Culture of Empathy website is the largest internet portal for resources and information aboutthe values of empathy and compassion. It contains articles, conferences, definitions, experts,history, interviews, videos, science and much more about empathy and compassion.http://CultureOfEmpathy.com

I posted a link to your article in ourEmpathy and Compassion Magazine - Animals and Empathy SectionThe latest news about empathy and compassion from around the worldhttp://bit.ly/dSXjfF

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JV • 11 months agoOR, people and dogs simply pay more attention to voices/faces that are familiar to them,and are therefore more likely to "catch" the yawn because they are paying attention and notbecause they are "empathizing". More basic mechanisms are not as exciting, but probably usuallytrue. What in the world kind of role could empathy play in yawning anyway? This is ridiculous. Also,

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