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So, we talked about contagious yawning in regards to bonobos.
In that,
bonobos will actually contagiously yawn when they see another bonobo yawning.
And what was interesting is they yawned with, there was a stranger, and the reason
we got excited about that, of course, is because in lots of different animals,
including humans, we know that animals contagiously yawn for individuals that
they have stronger bonds with, stronger relationships, closer ties with.
And people think this is sort of a basic form of empathy and
it ends up that there's now good evidence that dogs may contagiously yawn and they
may even contagiously yawn for individuals that they are more or less bonded with.
So, this is really a fun game to play with your dog, and
it's part of the Dognition Toolkit that you can play for
free, if you decide to do this as a laboratory activity.
It's really fun to see if your dog yawns and
then compare your dog to other dogs as well.
And the reason I bring this up is that it seems that dogs,
like primates, have strengths of different strengths of relationships in
the social groups that they're in, and this might be a really fun way to look at
the strength of those relationships as people continue to try to understand
how it is that dogs cooperate the way that they do.
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the amount of oxytocin,
which is a neural peptide that is created in both the dog and human.
It seems that there is an oxytocin loop between dogs and humans,
where, as a dog makes eye contact with you, oxytocin is being produced in you and
oxytocin is being produced in the dog, and oxytocin is known as the hug hormone.
It's a hormone that drives social behavior in humans and in other non-human animals.
It's the hormone,
for instance, that's related to a mother bonding with infants after birth.
And has been shown to be related to animals who have monogamous bonds,
tend to have a different level of oxytocin and receptivity to oxytocin,
than animals that do not have that same kind of bond.
So, oxytocin between humans and dogs seems to increase
just when we make eye contact and stare at each other.
That's why this again is a really interesting thing to check on
in your dog and another one of the things that you can do as a lab exercise,
if you choose, through Dognition.
And of course, the reason that's
really fun is because not all dogs make the same amount of eye contact.
And so, you can see where your dog falls and
how that relates to the bond that you feel you have with your dog.
The reason that that It seems to be important is there is research showing
that people who tend to report that they have more satisfaction in their
relationship with their dogs,
when they are then measured interacting with their dog, it's people who report
more satisfaction with their dog have dogs that make more eye contact with them.
And when it was measured through their urine,
those people were actually expressing more oxytocin in their urine,
suggesting that the dog that made more eye contact was creating more oxytocin,
making a stronger bond, thus making the people report when you ask them,
that they had greater satisfaction in that relationship.
So dogs are really built for cooperation and bonding.
And this is one of the fun and exciting things of this new research,
is we're understanding where this new bond comes from.
What drives it.
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So, to summarize, while wolves and dogs are similar in many ways in their social
system, they're really different because dogs are not cooperative breeders.
Mothers and offspring can recognize each other years later, but
siblings cannot in the case of dogs.
Dogs can assess numerical advantage when two packs meet.
Humans are not able to determine when a dog is guilty.
And there is evidence that dogs contagiously yawn
when they observe a person yawning.
This has been linked to the strength of their bond with that person.
Brian HareAssociate Professor
