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Dogs smell human stress

09.10.2022

Dog owners often notice that during difficult periods, pets behave unusually. It turned out that this is not a game of imagination: dogs can really experience the negative experiences of others and react to them.

Biologists from Queen's University in Belfast (Northern Ireland) found that dogs of different breeds can determine the stressful conditions of people with an accuracy of more than 90%. Thanks to the acute sense of smell, the four-legged "friends of man" experience the slightest deviations in the human biochemical trace.

The bodies of many animals, including humans, constantly emit VOCs into the environment. This is a manifestation of an evolutionary mechanism: smells create a whole system of biochemical signals through which animals interact with each other.

Because of a rather crude sense of smell, a person perceives only the strongest odors, but animals like dogs are able to capture even the weakest and most subtle aromas. Considering that humans began domesticating some canines tens of thousands of years ago, dogs may well have mastered the ability to smell the psychological state of their owners.

The scientists tested this hypothesis with a series of experiments. First, they took sweat and breath samples from 36 people who were at rest. The following samples were taken from the same people, but already in a state of stress, which was determined by the participants' self-assessment and objective indicators such as heart rate and blood pressure. The authors randomly mixed all these samples with samples of other odors, including inhuman ones.

Next, the researchers selected four dogs of different breeds and conducted a total of 720 scent discrimination tests. And in 93,75% of cases, the animals reacted to the "smell of stress" - they began to behave wary and restless. At the same time, the recognition accuracy reached 96,88% and did not fall below 90%.

The authors of the study concluded that stressful conditions change the biochemical composition of human sweat and breath, and dogs can feel it thanks to their acute sense of smell. Thus, they can be used as a sensitive detector of negative psychological processes such as anxiety, panic attacks, and post-traumatic stress disorder. But it is not yet clear what exactly changes in the composition of these biological fluids, and to which substances the dogs react.

The new discovery fits into the picture of preliminary studies: they showed, for example, that dogs can hear perfectly well those infected with the coronavirus. The detection accuracy exceeded 97%, even if the patients did not have any symptoms of Covid-19. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that dogs have learned to identify the anxiety and anxiety of their owners. Moreover, over tens of thousands of years, domesticated dogs, unlike their wild counterparts, have received a number of innate mechanisms “tailored” specifically for humans.

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