New Study: Is Your Dog a Pessimist?

We all see our pups as “man’s best friend” and assume that because they get their daily walks, pets, and treats they are happy dogs.

However, new research indicates that the mood of your dog might be related to the way you trained him. In the study, researchers compared the responses of dogs who had been trained with a reward based system to the responses of dogs who had been trained with an aversive based system when faced with a hidden bowl of dog food.

Researchers found when dogs were presented with different bowls of dog food, the ones who had been trained with a reward based system were more optimistic about the bowl containing dog food. The other dogs were not – in fact, they were pessimistic.

Training Methods

Dogs are usually trained using two different methods:

• Dogs are reprimanded for their actions during an averse system training. For example, using a spray bottle to reprimand a bad behavior.
• Dogs are rewarded with treats or attention for good behavior in a reward based training system. For example, this could be being pet when they sit to greet household guests.

There are already a variety of reasons that veterinarians recommend reward based training as an alternative to adverse training:

• Aggression, fearfulness, and anxiety are more common in dogs trained with an adverse training system.
• Dogs have a harder time associating the bad activity with an aversive stimulus than they do a good activity with a reward stimulus.
• Dogs can become confused and frustrated when faced with aversive stimuli. Though they know the inappropriate response to the situation, they do not understand how to correct their behavior and deliver the appropriate response.
• Averse training systems can cause physical and emotional pain to dogs.

However, researchers hadn’t considered the implications on cognitive biases associated with these training techniques. However, this study shed some light on the key differences in a dog’s mentality depending on their owner’s training method.

Results

To test the optimism and pessimism levels within dogs, researchers placed a bowl of dog food and a bowl without dog food in standardized locations. Once the dogs understood where the reward bowl of dog food was, they placed the bowls in new, ambiguous locations.

As a result, the dogs who had been trained using a rewards based system were more optimistic about the bowls in the ambiguous locations containing dog food. The dogs who had been trained using an averse training system approached the bowls with more caution.

The results from this study compared the mental expectations and cognitive biases of dogs trained with averse training systems to those of depressed human beings. Though this is a correlated relationship rather than a causal one, it is important to consider the possible negative effects of a training method on your dog’s mood states and mental well-being.

The photo featured at the top of this post is © Jaromir Chalabala/Shutterstock.com