Do dogs forgive you when you accidentally step on them?
Jena Lowe
2025-05-27 20:21:35
Count answers: 2
Scientists believe that when dogs appear to forgive their owners, they are able to understand that their owners did not mean to cause them harm. The perception of emotional expressions allows animals to evaluate the social intentions and motivations of each other. Using a cross-modal preferential looking paradigm, we presented dogs with either human or dog faces with different emotional valences paired with a single vocalisation from the same individual with either a positive or negative valence or Brownian noise. Dogs looked significantly longer at the face whose expression was congruent to the valence of vocalisation, for both conspecifics and heterospecifics, an ability previously known only in humans. These results demonstrate that dogs can extract and integrate bimodal sensory emotional information, and discriminate between positive and negative emotions from both humans and dogs. If you just talk nice to them and pet them and maybe give them a treat it's fine. You just apologise the same way you would apologise to a child or when you hit someone by mistake. Petting him like crazy and talking with a comforting voice should be enough. Dogs understand mistakes. You have effectively apologised, believe it or not. Dogs, cats, and pigs to I believe, are physically social animals and understand apologetic petting.
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