Usually the title of a scientific paper leaves people without the appropriate Ph.D. scratching their heads in puzzlement. "Timmy's in the Well" is an exception.
Yes, the reference is to a mythical episode of the Lassie TV show. Timmy never did fall down a well, although Lassie did.
This new scientific report questions whether dogs would help, or not help, their owners. And the research was, of course, inspired by a collie.
Julia Meyers-Manor, who studies animal behavior and cognition, had some experiments going on investigating empathy in rats that were running into some difficulties when she ran into a difficulty of her own.
"My children had buried me in a pile of pillows and I started calling out for help to my husband, who did not come to my aid."
Her collie, however, came at a run and started digging her out.
Aha, she wondered, why not use dogs and people instead of rats to study animal empathy? The people would cry for help and the dogs would, or would not, respond.
She discussed the idea with Emily Sanford, then an undergraduate at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., where Meyers-Manor was then teaching. They designed an experiment.
No one really doubted that dogs show some kind of concern or empathy for human distress. As the abstract for the paper states: "Dogs are thought to evaluate humans' emotional states, and attend more to crying people than to humming people."
The question was whether they would act to help a person in distress. Thus the scientific-sounding rest of the title of the article, which was published July 23 by the journal Learning and Behavior: "Empathy and Prosocial Helping in Dogs." (A link is at arkansasonline.com/806dog.)
In earlier studies that have found evidence of dogs' empathy, researchers have documented that dogs show signs of distress, including higher stress hormone levels, when listening
to the sound of babies crying compared to the sounds of babies babbling or white noise, and toward crying and whining of humans and dogs.
One earlier study put individual dogs in a room in their own home with their owner and a stranger. Both people hummed or cried at different times. Dogs consistently approached the person who was crying, even if it was the stranger, more often than if they were humming. The researchers concluded the dogs were motivated by empathy.
Other research has demonstrated that dogs will stay near a person who is pretending to have a heart attack but do not run to get help for him.
In another study, dogs helped other dogs press a lever to get a treat but did not do the same for humans who weren't asking for help with the lever.
WHO ARE THESE DOGS?
For the new research, the Macalester college team set out to test 39 adult dogs, big and small, purebred and mutt, with help from their owners. Five dogs were eliminated for various reasons: Two were too aggressive during baseline monitoring; one turned out to be deaf; one was pulled by the owner before the trial ended because the dog became too distressed. One owner urged the dog to open a door, which invalidated its response.
Of the 34 remaining dogs, 21 were male, 13 female; 29 had been spayed or neutered. About half were therapy dogs. They ranged in age from 11/2 to 12 years old and in weight from 8 to 160 pounds and were of various breeds, including mixed breed.
All the dogs wore a heart rate monitor during testing.
Distress behaviors were measured during the baseline monitoring as well as during the main part of the study. All the dogs showed distress in both situations, and the researchers suspect the dogs' unfamiliarity with the setting played a role. They suggest future studies could include a method for helping dogs get used to the test site.
Behaviors measured as evidence of dog distress were barking or whining, panting, sniffing the floor, sniffing or licking the person, shaking off, yawning, scratching oneself and flicking the tongue.
IN THE ROOM
The owners -- 32 women and two men -- were seated one at a time in a small room with a see-through door easily pushed open by even a small dog's nose or paw.
Some owners said, "Help" in a neutral tone of voice and hummed "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." Others said "Help" in a distressed tone, and cried.
All the people sat on their hands during the test to prevent hand gestures, and they were directed to look slightly above the dog's eye level to limit variation in eye contact between humming and crying.
The crying performances varied from owner to owner, which somewhat limits the researchers' confidence in their results. Meyers-Manor said the people produced "anything from real tears falling down their faces to things that sounded like laughter."
The dogs did not exactly replicate Lassie's television performance. About half of them opened the door for their owners, and the numbers were the same whether the owners were humming a happy tune or crying.
Being a therapy dog did not make the dog more likely to open the door.
On the other hand, the dogs that did open the door did so much more quickly for crying owners than they did for humming owners. So maybe they really do care.
The bond between dogs and their owners also was evaluated using an "impossible task" trial. Each owner and one stranger stood nearby while dogs tried to get into a glass jar holding a treat. At first the task was doable and the dogs were able to get the treat. But then the jar was locked so the dogs would be frustrated.
The more the frustrated dogs stared at their owners, the greater their bond was thought to be.
But during the prosocial section of the study, the strength of the dog-owner bond was not a predictor of whether the dog would open the door to help the "crying" human.
The fact that half of the dogs did open the door suggests that dogs are capable of prosocial action -- trying to help -- in response to empathy, researchers said.
Also, Meyers-Manor and her colleagues observed the dogs' heart rates and their behavior and found something intriguing. The dogs that didn't take any action when their owners were crying showed higher stress levels than the dogs that did act.
Perhaps, she said, their high levels of anxiety inhibited them from taking action.
Of course, some dogs were neither anxious nor helpful during the prosocial part of study. They relaxed or looked around.
Meyers-Manor said she didn't have enough information to offer prospective dog owners any tips on what breed or type of dog to get if you plan to fall down a well.
But if you are worried about being buried in pillows, a collie could be a good choice.
Celia Storey added information to this report.
ActiveStyle on 08/06/2018