Hormones play vital role in social bonding in canines.
London, May 20, 2019: Whenever you see your dog’s mouth wide open, her lips pull up at the corners, and her tongue lolls out, without the second thought you can consider she is grinning at you. Do dogs use this expression in the same way as people, to convey their joy, pleasure or contentedness? Well in that case if a research is to be believed it does happens.
The answer has roots in our 30,000-year history of keeping dogs as domesticated animals. Thanks to that history, humans and dogs have developed a unique bond, which has also made dogs very useful subjects for the study of communication. “Studying dogs is a really unique opportunity to look at social communication between species,” said Alex Benjamin, an associate lecturer in psychology, who studies dog cognition at the University of York in the United Kingdom.
Most of this research also reinforces the idea that the communicative bond we share with dogs is unique. For instance, researchers have found that dogs embrace the human gaze and use eye contact in a way that few other animals do.
A study published in the journal Current Biology tested how wolves and dogs would respond to the impossible task of opening a container to get at some meat they knew was within. The researchers found that while the wolves would simply stalk off when they discovered they couldn’t open it, dogs would turn around and give humans a long, inquiring gaze, suggesting that these animals knew a person could help them complete the task.
Another study, published in the journal Science, found that both dogs and humans experience an increase in levels of oxytocin, a hormone that plays a role in social bonding — when they lock eyes with one another. Even more intriguing, dogs that sniffed oxytocin would then spend more time staring at humans.
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