How Your Mood Shapes Your Dog's Behaviour: Emotional Contagion and Energy

Anyone who has come home after a dreadful day to find the dog on edge, or watched a dog chill out beside a calm person within minutes, has seen emotional contagion at work. This series looks at five ways our dogs read and absorb our mood, drawn from Chapter Nine of my book, The Balanced Dog, and each one is a good reason to pay as much attention to our own state as we do to theirs.

Dogs read our mood through scent

A dog's nose picks up changes in the hormones, pheromones and chemicals we give off in our sweat, so every chemical reaction going on inside us carries its own odour, and for a dog that information arrives constantly. Scent heads straight for the limbic system, bypassing the usual decision making processes and speaking directly to the memory and emotional centres, which means the dog is feeling - and responding - to our mood before we have even had the chance to decide what it is! We like to believe we can put a brave face on things at the door or out on the walk, but the nose has already read the full story, and the dog gets the real version of how we are feeling whatever our face or our words are doing.

Dogs read our faces

Dogs use a left gaze bias when they look at human faces, which is the same technique we use to read each other's emotions, and they do not use it when looking at other dogs, which suggests the habit developed specifically for reading us (very cool - I think so anyway). They also adjust their gaze depending on whether the face in front of them is negative, neutral or positive, and dogs raised in kennels with little human contact are significantly worse at it than dogs raised around people, so the skill is sharpened by living with us and is not purely instinctive. A dog who lives with you has had a great deal of practice at reading your specific face, and it is worth remembering that whenever you think you are hiding how you feel...

Dogs sense our mood but cannot work out why

Dogs can sense our energy through scent and posture, but they cannot work out why we feel the way we do, so a dog has no way of knowing that a relative has died and that we would like some gentle company because we are sad. Some dogs become unsettled and nervous, others calmly take over the decision making, and some simply help themselves to our dinner when we turn our backs or start growling at visitors, yet all of them are responding to the same message, that we are no longer balanced and in control. Our mood sets the tone for what the dog does next, which is why checking our own state is where the work with the dog has to begin.

Cortisol: your stress becomes their stress

When researchers measured long term cortisol in dogs and their owners they found a direct correlation, so your anxiety really does become your dog's anxiety, and because cortisol is slow to clear, a stressful weekend can still be showing up in your dog's behaviour midweek. Dogs with higher cortisol also show lower serotonin, and that is where the behaviour problems begin, often before any physical symptoms appear, with chronic elevation producing the perpetually edgy, reactive dogs most of us have met. A secure and calm attachment with you is physiologically protective, which makes the quality of your relationship a genuine part of your dog's stress management!

The oxytocin loop between you and your dog

Mutual gazing between dogs and the people they trust raises oxytocin in both, creating a feedback loop similar to the one between mother and infant, and touch does much the same, with massage being particularly good because skin on skin contact is such a strong trigger. Oxytocin can lower vasopressin, the so-called aggression hormone, and as vasopressin falls so do blood pressure and heart rate, so dog and owner both come away with a better bond and a healthier body from the same quiet time together. Research also suggests that life experience matters more than genetics in how a dog's oxytocin system responds, which means the relationship you build really does shape his neurochemistry.

Read more in The Balanced Dog

Chapter Nine of The Balanced Dog goes into emotion, energy and the canine mind in much more depth, including how posture, hormones and mood feed back into one another in both dogs and people. The book is available on Amazon: The Balanced Dog by Julia Langlands.