My last dog of mental calmness so I want to talk about my fave subject…..DOGS. It is no secret that I am a dog person…….I have had their friendship all my life……my two best friends today made it possible for me to come to grips with my injuries and the toll it took……
You have to admit that dogs can have some of the greatest facial expressions ever. But are they capable of the feeling of say pessimism?
A great question we know they can surely appear to be so……but can they really?
Certain dogs apparently feel like they’re perpetually in the doghouse, according to a University of Sydney study that says some dogs are pessimists, getting demoralized more easily than other dogs and just giving up on tasks when they’ve had enough. The research, published this week in the Plos One journal, isn’t saying that pessimistic dogs are necessarily sad: It’s just that they’re more risk-averse because they expect the worst after experiencing setbacks and are more likely than their more “optimistic” canine counterparts to just accept the way things are rather than try to change them.
The 40 dogs in the study had to touch a target upon hearing two tones two octaves apart; one tone would reward them with milk, the other with water, the Washington Post reports. It’s when the researchers sandwiched “ambiguous” tones in between the two main ones that some dogs’ moods started going south: Certain dogs kept hitting the targets no matter what reward resulted, while “pessimistic” dogs stopped touching the target altogether after not receiving the coveted milk. The Post notes that perhaps the dogs aren’t pessimists at all, but realists—one University of Colorado professor says he’s curious if they’re actually pessimistic or just got tired of waiting. But the results could have useful training applications: Dogs that take risks could be used for tasks that require more persistence, such as searching for explosives, while wary pups could serve as more careful guide dogs.
Dogs rule!
“Dogs that take risks could be used for tasks that require more persistence, such as searching for explosives, …”
Yes but the wary pups get to live longer by avoiding such risks. 🙂
True that
Dogs are as highly sensitive to emotional stimuli as their noses are sensitive to smell – – which is about a thousand times stronger than our own sense of smell – – and dogs, therefore, will mirror the degree of optimism or pessimism displayed by their owner companions.
Dogs are also subservient to conditioning and this includes experiential self-conditioning. So dogs will “try” things and some of them will keep on trying until they get it right. It is because of this syndromatic anomoly that dogs eventually learn to perform tricks at the bidding of their owners to the degree of perfection demanded by their owners.
This is, of course, a bit of a Pavlovian manifestation.
Some dog pessimism may be simply a dog trying to please the master/owner/companion by mirroring and some may be inherent to the dog but at any rate, the dog that manifests emotioinal nuance to significantly perceptive degrees has to be fairly well advanced intellectually – – but as we already know . . . most dogs operate at the about the mental level of a two-year-old child.
But innate pessimism is another question entirely and I tend to believe that if a dog is either optimistic or pessimistic then it is because the owner has somehow transferred these responses to the animal.
I tell the story of my Baby Gilr….when she first came to liuve here we were out back and I wanted to get her to play fetch…..I threw the stick….she just looked at it….I went and got it came back and threw it again….same reaction from her….I went to get the stick one more time and as I bent over to pick it up I had an epiphany……she was actually teaching me to play fetch…….
I have a rule with my friends……I do not teach them silly tricks all I ask is that they have manners around the table….after that she was free to do her own thing….and so far she taught herself to open the closed back door and so many other small things…..she is just too smart for a dog……I am convinced she is 100 times smarter than anyone in the Tea Party….
All creatures are higher in the evolutionary scale than anything the Tea Party can boast about . . . No brainer!
Thanks for reminding me because I find it comforting to be reminded of this fact from time to time. 🙂