A shoulder to cry on: Heart rate variability and empathetic behavioral responses to crying and laughing in dogs.

Dogs have a reputation for empathy toward their owners, which is also supported by some research (e.g., Carballo et al., 2020; Sanford, Burt, & Meyers-Manor, 2018). Many dog owners anecdotally report that dogs comfort them by making visual and/or physical contact when they cry or help them when they are sick. These behaviours provide a good way to assess the capacity for empathy and its physiological correlates in dogs. This study is a replication and extension of Custance and Mayer (2012). We examined whether using laughing as an alternative stimulus to humming produced similar responses to crying. Dogs were tested in their homes while a stranger and owner pretended to cry, laugh, and while the owner and stranger were talking. During each counterbalanced condition, the dog was observed for person-oriented behaviours and simultaneously had their heart rate variability measured. Like Custance and Mayer, dogs showed more behaviours directed toward the person crying, whether the owner or the stranger, than during baseline or laughing conditions. We did not find an effect of laughing on person-oriented behaviours, suggesting that dogs respond to the crying uniquely and not as a novel stimulus. In the condition when the stranger was crying, dogs that showed higher stress responses, as indicated by lower heart rate variability, were most likely to show person-oriented behaviours toward the stranger. This suggests that dogs that experience more distress, through emotional contagion, are more likely to show person-oriented behaviours toward the distressed stranger, indicating a possible mechanism for empathy-like behaviours. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).