Spot test shows humans bad at identifying an angry dog

IT HAS occasionally been said that humans can see the sadness in the eyes of dogs, but scientists have now found that we struggle to spot anger.

Almost 100 people were shown short video clips of human children, dogs and macaques and asked to say whether they thought it was an example of playful, aggressive or neutral behaviour.

The work, led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, found that people were bad at spotting aggression.

Dr Juliane Bräuer, the study author and a canine behaviour expert, said if people were purely guessing what emotion was on display, they would have got it right 33 per cent of the time.

However, data revealed that when it came to analysing current and future behaviours, people only identified aggression in dogs 29 and 23 per cent of the time, respectively.

In contrast, people can see playfulness in dogs 69 and 67 per cent of the time for current and future behaviours.

Examples of aggressive dog behaviour were a sudden stiffening of the body, whereas a bow was a tell-tale sign of playfulness.

Humans were better at spotting aggression in macaques, the team found, and were able to spot current signs of hostility 56 per cent of the time.

Humans are not as good at spotting when the primates are in a jovial mood as we can only see that 48 per cent of the time, according to the new study’s data.

“Participants performed poorly when assessing dogs’ aggressive behaviour,” claims the research study, published in the journal PLOS ONE.

“They also assessed aggressive interactions in dogs worse than playful and neutral ones.”

The scientists add that our inability to spot signs of aggression in dogs could explain why so many people get attacked or bitten.

“A possible method of preventing severe biting incidents could entail that prospective dog owners are better educated about dog behaviour before adopting, as it has also been found that owning a dog does not improve the ability to assess dog behaviour,” the scientists write.

The team also found that people were relatively bad at spotting signs of aggression from fellow people, getting it right only around 40 per cent of the time.

“It is possible that humans are biased to assume good intentions from other humans and from “man’s best friend”, sometimes preventing us from recognising aggressive situations in these species,” the scientists add.