Any do owner out there has a way to tell if his dog did something wrong. She may have just pooped on the floor, or eaten your new carpet on the stairs.
Because your friend has done something she was not supposed to have done and by assuming she is also aware of that, you try to read what her face tells you. You are a human being, so naturally when she looks at you, your quick assumption is that she is guilty.
The reality of the matter is you are wrong and that your dog is expressing a rather common, less complex emotion – fear.
I am not just telling you this from my assumption – but instead based on a 2009 research done by Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, author of 2009’s “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know” and 2016’s “Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell.”
According to the dog cognition scientist, we interpret the guilty look basing on human understanding of emotions. We humans use our emotions to predict the emotions of a dog.
One looks at a dog who looks guilty and eventually that person feels the look guilty. It’s kind of a wired connection.
The study results revealed that the guilty look is a response of the owner’s cues instead of an admittance to have committed a misdeed.
Dr. Alexandra Horowitz explains that whenever we think our dog is demonstrating the feeling of guilt, the reality is that she is expressing fear of scolding.
Dog guilty look
There is nothing to suggest that dogs think in a similar manner as we do because the very varied types of brains but “in most ways dogs’ brains are more similar to ours than dissimilar.”
One thing that scientists agree is that dogs are incapable of reflecting on their past action and decide it was wrong or it wasn’t. Some studies have shown that certain animals can plan for the future and at the same time recall individual deeds done in the past. “With dogs, there’s not as much evidence yet. Which isn’t to say that they don’t, but it’s to say that it’s really hard to design experiments around it,” says Dr. Horowitz.
Just like their owners, dogs have memories, but thinking about the memories may be quite a difficult task for them.
There is a limitation on scientific evidence on how dogs interpret emotions, making us to use our own anthropomorphisms with which we can term a dog to be guilty or not.