Paw-spective shift: how our mood alters the way we read dog emotions

Abstract

This study explored the influence of people's mood on their perception of dog emotions in order to expand our understanding of how mood biases may shape emotional interpretation. Across two experiments, participants were primed into positive, neutral, or negative moods using validated visual stimuli before they evaluated video clips of dogs displaying positive, neutral, or negative emotional states. Participants were asked to rate valence and arousal of the dogs in the videos. Experiment 1 utilized visual primes unrelated to animals, while Experiment 2 employed dog-specific primes. Although mood priming significantly influenced participants' self-reported emotions in Experiment 1, it did not affect their interpretation of the dogs' emotional states. Dog- specific primes influenced participants' interpretation of dog emotions in Experiment 2; however, the effect was a contrasting one, in that participants in the positively induced group rated dogs as sadder and those in the negative group rated dogs as happier. These findings challenge previous assumptions about mood-congruence effects in cross-species emotional perception, suggesting a more complex interplay of factors than anticipated. The study underscores the need for further research to disentangle the mechanisms governing how humans perceive and respond to animals' emotional cues, with implications for improving animal welfare and human-animal interactions.