Crying with Rover: Are dogs empathetic?

(Photo by Crimfants)

Empathy is at the heart of religion and spirituality.  Such familiar admonitions as “Love one another” speak to that.

Humans, of course, struggle mightily with the ability to lovingly relate to each other's suffering.  Many are instead convinced that canines have a much greater capacity for such virtue.  In fact, there is a story about St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio that ends with the wolf exemplifying the path of peace and holiness to an entire town of people.

What does science have to say about that?  Can canines really “understand” the teachings of St. Francis?Does Rover really “get” our pain enough to respond with love?

The results of a recent study by psychologist Deborah Custance and her colleague Jennifer Mayer show that

dogs “were more likely to approach a crying person than someone who was humming or talking, and that they normally responded to weeping with submissive behaviors.”  Live Science reported that although these

results indicate a dog’s ability to differentiate between crying and other audible human behaviors, they by no

means conclusively prove that dogs are empathetic.  

In a different article titled “How Animal and Human Emotions are Different,” Live Science again cautions

against the assumption that dogs are “hardwired” for the same emotions as humans.  However, this same

article also indicates that “survival circuits” within all mammals are quite similar.  Although neuroscientist

Joseph LeDoux warns that a dog’s tail-wagging and a person’s smile may be expressing two very different

forms of joy, he nevertheless concedes that both these expressions are rooted within the similar mammalian survival circuits.

A third Live Science article titled “Dogs Understand Us Better Than Chimps Do” points out how well adapted dogs are to human communication.  Cognitive psychologist Juliane Kaminski attributes this to “selection pressures during domestication.”  When she and her colleagues compared how effectively chimpanzees and dogs responded to human pointing, the dogs won paws down.       

Resources

http://www.americancatholic.org/features/francis/stories.asp#wol

http://www.livescience.com/20823-canine-comfort-dogs-understand-emotion.html

http://www.livescience.com/18411-dogs-understand-humans-chimps.html

http://www.livescience.com/18750-animal-human-emotions-fears.html

Copyright June 12, 2012 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved