Being under stress can cause all kinds of changes in the human body, from heart rates to the chemicals released into the bloodstream, and it turns out our canine pals can sniff out those stress- related changes, even in strangers.
This is the first time that researchers have looked at how a dog's sense of smell can help them identify when humans are stressed.
Research can be used to improve training for dogs that are involved in support for anxiety, panic attacks, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
According to animal behavior researcher Clara Wilson from Queen's University Belfast, the findings show that we produce different smells through our sweat and breath when we are stressed, and that dogs can tell this apart from our smell if they are relaxed.
According to the research, dogs don't need visual or audio stimuli to deal with stress.
A total of 720 smell tests were carried out on people and dogs in the study. Human volunteers were asked to do a math problem and self-report their stress levels at the same time.
Sweat and breath samples were taken after human participants' blood pressure and heart rate increased. The samples were presented to the dogs to see if they could alert researchers to the stress samples in the baseline control samples.
The dogs did exactly what they were trained to do. The dogs were able to alert researchers to the stress sample in almost all of the trials.
Wilson told The Guardian that it was amazing to see the people tell him that the two things were not the same.
The smell of stress can be picked up on by dogs.
The owner of a two-year-old Cocker Spaniel named Treo said that their dog was very excited to see the researchers and take part in the study, even autonomously navigating his way to the lab.
Helen Parks said that the study made them more aware of the dog's ability to see. "We believe that this study gave us the ability to sense a change in emotion at home."
The study reinforced that dogs are highly sensitive and intuitive, and there is immense value in using what they do best.
A new piece of research shows that dogs can detect emotions like happiness and fear through the smells that we give off, and that's in line with previous studies that show dogs can mirror our levels of stress.
The study could give some insight into how dogs see the world and how they interact with people along the way.
When it comes to dogs with people, smell seems to play a big part. It is possible that dogs are sensitive to their owner's emotions and want to comfort them.
We can add this to the long list of subtle changes in humans that dogs are capable of detecting. Dogs have been used to sniff out infections before.
"This is the first study of its kind, and it provides evidence that dogs can smell stress from breath and sweat, which could be useful when training service dogs and therapy dogs."
It adds to our understanding of how dogs may interpret and interact with human psychological states and sheds more light on the human- dog relationship.
The research is in a journal.
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