Affect matters: positive and negative social stimulation influences dogs’ behaviour in a subsequent situation involving an out-of-reach object

There is ample evidence to suggest that dogs have highly developed, context-dependent social skills. Recent literature also indicates a human-like susceptibility to social influence in dogs. However, it is still unclear how the affective social context affects the way dogs behave in a situation involving an out-of-reach object. The experimental manipulation served to prime the dogs with positive and negative affect in the form of social in-teractions. Dogs (N = 20) participated in both a negative and a positive social interaction with an unfamiliar male experimenter. Having received pretreatment with different social stimuli, subjects were observed in an instrumental task with an unfamiliar female experimenter requesting an out-of-reach object. The analysis of the dogs? tendency to engage in the task revealed that although the type of pretreatment did not influence whether they retrieved the cued object or not, the social interactions had a facilitatory effect on other, more subtle aspects of their behaviour. The positive interaction resulted in longer duration of looking time at the experimenter; shorter latency of moving upon release and of approaching the experimenter. The priming effects of the negative social interaction manifested in longer duration of looking time at the owner after release while gazing more at the target object during the first trial. These behaviours, together with the finding that dogs were more hesitant to approach the experimenter after the negative social interaction, may indicate that a negative emotional stimulation (involving the owner?s and the experimenter?s unresponsive behaviour, separation and a threatening stranger) causes a temporary disruption in the dog-owner bond, motivating the dog to repair it afterwards. These findings suggest that the valence attributed to the social interaction during pretreatment has differential effects on dogs? subsequent behaviour. Possible parallels with and differences from human behaviour are [email protected]