Hello ladies ... puppy dog eyes proven to work best on women

Bigger-eyed pets are seen as cuter and younger, and prompt ‘baby talk’ – but not from men, study shows

‘Women were producing really high tones of voice and their range went up massively’

PUPPY dog eyes are used to get away with all sorts of mischief, but they work much better on women, a study has found.

Scientists analysed men’s and women’s voices while talking to dogs with varying eye sizes.

Larger eyes were more likely to make a woman slip into “pet-directed speech”, the vocal pattern akin to “baby talk”, which is characterised by extreme high and low pitch.

Men, however, were unlikely to adopt “doggy talk” when talking to dogs with eyes of any size.

Dr Holly Root-Gutteridge, a dog behaviour and bioacoustics expert at the University of Lincoln, led the study, titled The Puss in Boots effect, on 21 men and 24 women where photographs of 12 breeds had their eyes digitally enlarged and shrunk.

“We were interested in the whole thing about puppy dog eyes and neoteny, where juvenile-looking features are more appealing to humans, and we wondered if that leads to people using more of the funny, silly voice to dogs,” she said.

“We know dogs respond to this pet-directed speech, but we were interested in what is actually making us do this. Is it just the eyes getting bigger that makes us feel they look more babylike so we use baby-talk?”

The study showed participants a stock image of a dog, as well as three other versions where its eyes were edited to be shrunk by 15 per cent, enlarged by 15 per cent and enlarged by 30 per cent.

Bigger-eyed dogs were deemed cuter and younger by participants, as well as being more likely to evoke a vocal change from women.

“Eyes getting bigger definitely did make women respond more when we looked at the voices. Women increased their pitch range, so they went up and down more, but men did not alter their voices at all,” Dr Root-Gutteridge said.

She added: “The main point of the study is women, but not men, use more baby talk to animals depending on eye size but men don’t really vary their voices in response to anything when it comes to images of dogs. Women were producing really high tones of voice and their range went up massively. They were producing much more exaggerated pet-directed speech.”

Dr Root-Gutteridge said the response showed that men and women fundamentally and subconsciously think of cuteness in different ways.

Jemma Forman, co-author and a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex, said that while bigger eyes were cuter, the 30 per cent increase in eye size had other effects on people.

“When the eye size becomes too big and looks out-of-place, an ‘uncanny valley’ effect takes over in which the dogs become overall less pleasant and more unsettling to view,” she said.

“Therefore, women speak with a less exaggerated vocal range to the dogs with large, uncanny eye sizes. This effect is more obvious in breeds such as the pug or pomeranian, breeds of dog who already have relatively large eyes for their head size.”

Dr Root-Gutteridge also suggested that trendy brachycephalic breeds – flat-faced dogs, such as french bulldogs and pugs – may not be deemed as cute as many believe. The team asked more than 400 people to rate the cuteness of the larger-eyed dogs, with the golden retriever coming out on top. Flat-faced, big eyed pugs came ninth out of 12.

“While almost everybody rated bigger eyes as cuter, when we broke it down by breed, what came out on top was the golden retriever, and lower was the pug and the Pomeranian.”

Last year, pugs were the 14th most common breed, according to Kennel Club birth registrations, with almost 3,500 puppies born, more than the number of border collies, boxers and Rottweilers.

The study is published in the journal Interaction Studies: Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems.