Do dogs match their owners

Do dogs really look like their owners, according to the BBC, Michael Roy at the University of California, San Diego was one of the first psychologists to put the idea to the test. Going to three nearby dog parks, he photographed the pooches and the owners separately, and then asked a group of participants to try to match them up. Despite no additional cues, he found that they were able to work out who lived with whom with reasonable accuracy. This work has since been repeated many times, notably by Dr. Sadahiko Nakajima at Japan’s Kwansei Gakuin University. Dr. Nakajima conducted a study using photographs of humans and their pups. He asked undergraduate students to match each person with their dog from the randomly ordered photographs. The results showed that the students correctly guessed the person and the pup by looking at the photos at a rate significantly higher than luck alone. Dr. Nakajima’s research, published in 2009, found that there really is truth to the idea that dogs resemble their owners. The reason behind why some dogs look like their owners may be due to familiarity, or what psychologists call “the mere exposure effect.” According to Dr. Nakajima, a major reason of the dog–owner facial resemblance is the so-called ‘mere exposure effect,' or the idea that a person might choose to get a dog who looks similar to themselves because of a preference for the familiar.

A study finds that dogs and their owners often develop similar personalities. Now, new research has shown that owners and their pups often share personality traits, too. A study published in the Journal of Research in Personality suggests that a dog's personality mirrors that of its owner. The findings revealed that, similar to humans, dogs' personalities evolve over time and are influenced by their lifestyles and experiences. Active and outgoing individuals tended to have dogs with similar characteristics, while those with anxious or aggressive dogs typically displayed more negative personality traits themselves. It's likely that people choose dogs that align with their lifestyles, leading to a melding of dog and human personalities over time. After assessing 16 popular dog breeds in relation to the five main personality types, the team found that pet parents' character traits often matched up with those of their chosen dog breed. Overall, while dogs and owners may not always have identical personalities, various factors, including breed and training, can contribute to similarities between them. Contributing factors such as selection bias, environmental influence, shared lifestyles, and emotional connection all play a role in the similarities between a dog's and owner's personality.

You may know dogs and people whose personalities are mirror images of each other: a low-key pet parent with an equally mellow pup or an outgoing pet parent with a dog who greets everyone with wet kisses. Scientists say that dog personality is strongly linked to human personality. Pet parents overwhelmingly responded that they share all five personality dimensions with their dogs. The independent peers also rated them as sharing all the dimensions, except for openness. A calm human will often choose a calm dog, or an anxious person will adopt a frightened dog, for example. People do this on a subconscious level. Dogs have an ability to read and match human emotions, when a person is very anxious, our dogs understand this and often become anxious as well. Dogs are true empaths, they can sense minute physiologic changes in people and other animals and respond accordingly. The closer the human-animal relationship, the greater the response. While experts say it’s more common for dogs to acquire personality traits from their pet parents, it’s possible for dog emotions and behavior to impact humans.

Dogs really do look and act just like their owners. Guide dogs, for example, can cost up to $50,000 to train, but about a third are returned because they don’t bond with their allocated owner.

Whilst not a universal phenomenon amongst all owners and dogs, there is some evidence that purebred dogs and owners tend to resemble each other at some level. Several studies have found that people can successfully match pictures of purebred dogs with pictures of their owners at levels above random chance. In one study, participants were able to match dogs with their owners regardless of whether they were told to choose the real dog-owner pairs or just choose pairs that looked alike. This finding suggests that it's physical appearance, and not some other element, that people are using to make these judgments. Facial features, especially the eyes, are more integral to the perception of resemblance than qualities such as size, hairstyle and physical fitness, a different 2015 study found. Research suggests it's probably that people choose dogs that look like them, for example, a 2004 study found that how long a person had owned their dog wasn't correlated with their resemblance. Alternatively, it may be that we prefer dogs who look somewhat similar to us due to the 'mere exposure effect,' in which people prefer familiar items over those they have not seen before or seen less often. Findings from a recent study indicate that dogs and their owners resemble each other in the 'Big Five' personality dimensions: extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism.