You Can Usually Tell How Stressed Someone Is By How Much Food Their Dog Eats, Says Study
DimaBerlin | ShutterstockA study has found that dogs recognize basic reactive emotions like happiness and sadness, along with a variety of other complex feelings, including one that they can sniff out on their owners.
Not only are our furry besties always looking out for us, but they’re also impacted by our overall health, and not just because they rely on us for food and fun. However, it isn’t just visual and verbal cues that allow dogs to understand how we’re feeling. Dogs can smell their owners' sweat and breath to decipher stress. Sadly, when their owner is stressed, it impacts their diet.
Dogs can smell your stress levels, which can affect their mood and health, including how much food they eat.
The 2024 study published in the journal Scientific Reports revealed that dogs can smell their owner’s stress levels through an "odd scent" that changes based on the activity that person is doing. This stress scent often affects dogs’ activity, performance, and routine, and just like with their human companions, can ultimately impact their health and well-being.
After collecting breath and sweat samples from people engaged in both high-stress and low-stress activities, the study’s researchers assigned food bowls to each sample and measured the ways in which dogs approached or avoided them.
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Unsurprisingly, dogs purposefully avoided food bowls with the “stress samples,” leading researchers to conclude that the dogs could smell stress hormones and that this negatively affected their emotional baseline. For this same reason, many animal experts suggest that dogs have the ability to sense general upset in their owners.
Different dogs might be affected in different ways, but common symptoms of distress that might manifest in your pup could include a loss of appetite or stomach irritation.
Dogs are always evaluating the best ways to interact with you based on how you’re feeling.
If they sense that you’re upset, they might become more low-energy, avoid eye contact, cuddle up, or become uninterested in toys and food. One study even found that dogs will try to make you laugh by repeating behavior, actions, or sounds that they remember made you smile or boosted your own emotional state.
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"Being a species that we've lived and co-evolved with for thousands of years, it kind of makes sense that dogs would learn to read our emotions because it might be helpful to them to know if there's something threatening in the environment or some stressor that they need to be aware of," says one of the lead study authors Dr. Zoe Parr-Cortes, a veterinarian and Ph.D. student at Bristol Veterinary School.
Not only are they hilarious and cute, but they’re also sensitive. Your best furry friend is always looking out for your best interest and is concerned when your baseline is skewed. Incredibly sensitive and intuitive, dogs truly are man’s best friend, or, at the very least, man’s built-in emotional support friend.
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a senior editorial strategist with a bachelor’s degree in social relations & policy and gender studies who focuses on psychology, relationships, self-help, and human interest stories.
