You love your dog. Does your dog love you back? A group of Swedish and Danish researchers went looking for an answer. More specifically, knowing that dogs are highly attuned to cues from humans, the researchers suspected that dogs belonging to owners who felt they had a great relationship with their pets would also perceive that the relationship was close, perhaps because the owners' attitude would lead to a high frequency of positive interactions between the duo.
Twenty dog-owner pairs participated in the study, which was led by Therese Rehn of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and published in the January 2014 issue of Applied Animal Behaviour Science. The humans all completed a questionnaire called the Monash Dog Owner Relationship Scale (MDORS), which was designed to evaluate the strength of the relationship from the perspective of the owner. The MDORS contains 28 items divided into three subscales. The first subscale assesses the nature of the dog-owner interactions (“How often do you hug your dog?”), the second reflects the emotional closeness that the owner feels toward his or her dog (“I wish my dog and I never had to be apart”), and the third concerns the perceived investment required to care for a dog (“My dog costs too much money”).
The dogs were thrust into a modified version of the Ainsworth “strange situation” procedure, a clever experiment originally designed to measure the strength of human parent-child relationships. It centers on a child—or dog—being left alone with a stranger. The doggy version begins with the owner sitting in a chair ignoring the dog. After a few minutes, a stranger comes into the room and, ignoring the dog, talks to the owner. The stranger attempts to play with the dog, and then the owner quietly leaves the room. The stranger continues to engage the dog in play and then exits, leaving the dog alone. The owner returns, greets the dog and begins ignoring it again. The stranger returns, greets the dog and ignores it as well. Finally, the owner leaves once more.
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When conducted with human toddlers, the slightly distressing nature of the strange situation activates an innate, adaptive system that motivates the child to seek comfort from the parent. By carefully observing the children and weighing their comfort-seeking behaviors against their more independent exploration behaviors, researchers can determine whether or not children have secure emotional attachments to their parents. Children who feel more securely attached are more likely to seek closeness with Mom or Dad when stressed but also to play independently once they feel comfortable.
The researchers predicted that canines whose owners perceived their relationship with their pets to be strongest would behave in ways indicative of strong bonding during the test. Instead they found only two significant correlations. When dogs were reunited with their owners after being alone, those whose owners reported having a lot of interactions with the animals sought out such interactions more—which might look like strong attachment but could equally have been a reflection of past rewards for initiating physical contact. And unlike securely attached toddlers, canines of such owners were less likely than others to play independently in the strange situation. In that way, they resembled insecurely attached youngsters. Dogs are not children, though, and did not show the separation anxiety that insecurely attached children display; thus, the latter finding is hard to interpret.
This study marks one of the first attempts to scientifically probe the connection between dogs' perceptions of their bond with their owners and owners' perceptions of their bond with their dogs. And here's the bad news for all those dog lovers who are just certain that Fluffy loves them back: there was no correlation between the “perceived emotional closeness” subscale of the MDORS questionnaire and the dogs' behavior in the strange situation. The researchers put it bluntly: “There was no evidence to support the view that because a person has a strong emotional bond to their dog, their dog is similarly attached to them.” You cannot simply love a dog so much that it will be forced to love you back.