Humans have more empathy for dogs than people, finds study

According to two studies, we tend to feel sympathetic to struggling dogs more than difficult people.

Two years ago, Harrison Foundation, a medical research charitable organization, conducted experiments to test if people are more likely to donate money to help dogs and humans.

The researchers printed two ads, both of which threw a question of "Do you donate £ 5 to save Harrison from a slow and painful death?"

The only difference between advertisements is a picture - one is Harrison as a little boy and the other is a dog.

This idea was backed up by another recent research on empathy of humans and dogs. It concluded that we were further upset about the story of beaten or injured dog.

This time, Professor Jack Levin and Professor Arnold Arluke of North Eastern University in Boston provided one of four fake newspaper reports to 240 participants.

"A few minutes after the attack, the police arrived, the police found that the victim's leg was broken, torn in many places, and found unconscious."

But with each version, the victims are different - it's a 1 year old baby, a 30 year old adult, a puppy or a 6 year old adult dog

This report, published in Social and Animals magazine, reveals that participants are being asked to use standard questions to describe their emotions to measure empathy.

Participants who read stories about children, dogs, or puppies measured similar empathic levels, but adults reported less, Times reported

Researchers said respondents were significantly less painful than human babies, puppies and adult dogs, compared to adults after adults were sacrificed. The sympathy score of adults is only lower than that of infant victims.

They wrote: "Subjects did not regard their dogs as animals, but they considered" skin babies "or their families as human children. "

They also suggested that if they think they can not look after themselves helplessly, we are more likely to express sympathy to the victims.

However, there are contradictory studies. In this survey, there was no difference in empathy between children who own pets and children who do not have pets. But the researchers discovered that those keeping dogs are more considerate than those who have other types of pets. They also observed that those keeping cats had low sympathy.

Many studies have attempted to measure loyalty to the dog owners. For example, according to Science Daily, a survey found that dogs could express sympathy for humans and try to help them. In this study, the dog partner cried or sang in a different room. The dog then opens the door to another room to enter the owner and comforting her companion when she hears that he is crying. This reaction shows that when we feel sad and when we want to help you feel better, the dog really shows you to understand, this is definitely the many dog ​​loyalty story you will hear Just another example.

The close relationship between humans and dogs may be based on empathy. Investigation by the Royal Society in 2016: Biology Express has confirmed that today's dog owner will listen to everyone. Dogs can interpret human emotional state based on facial expressions. These cognitive skills may have evolved from highly organized behavior that we believe to exist in ancestral wolves. Wolf's complex social system may have used them for domestication, but we can say how they actually made a leap from the wild predator to the fireside friend I will. That is because dogs are the only animal that underwent this process when humans are still nomadic hunter gatherers. Our template to understand how other animals are raised does not apply to dogs after agriculture has appeared.

What happens when yawning? If this causes yawning of your dog, give me a treat. He is a smart dog. According to Reuters, some dogs are aware that human yawning is contagious, which suggests that they have a basic empathy. Of the 29 dogs studied by British researchers at Birkbeck College in London, 72% were responding to dog yawn and were very sensitive to human yawning. The main research author, Mr. Atsushi Senju, wrote in Biology Express magazine that dogs are good at reading human social cues and suggest that there is a possibility of being related to sympathy It is.