Did you know that dogs can smell your emotional state…and it alters their mood?

Our Dog Boarding zetland facility welcomes over 20 dogs per day. So a strong interest in dogs is natural for us. Understanding how a dog’s mind works helps us to take better care of them!

I used to have a dog who was afraid of other dogs and for some weird reason he seemed to attract aggressive dogs and was attacked many times. This got me thinking whether dogs can ‘smell fear’ and the scent triggers an aggressive response in the dog. If so, the individual’s fear would be strengthened because their fearful scent would generate a hostile response in other dogs. There is no direct data of this.
However, there is a lot of evidence which suggests that dogs are good at reading human emotions.

Dogs can read the facial expressions of people. They respond differently to happy and angry facial expressions. And not only from live people, but also from photographs! Most importantly, dogs do not simply read these facial expressions but react to them as well. They change their responses to individuals and the things in their environment based on these expressions.

There is also evidence that dogs can read our tone of voice and extract our emotional state from that.

If, for instance, if a person uses a happy tone of voice, the dog is much more likely to approach them.

However, a dog’s ability to recognize scent has only barely been investigated in this regard.

It makes sense to think that a person’s emotional state may alter how they smell to a dog. This is due our emotions triggering pheromones, biological chemicals, that alter the composition of bodily fluids, such as sweat. There are some studies that indicate that dogs do react to these scents but there’s no evidence of aggressive responses.