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Why Dogs Really Feel Your Pain

Published September 4, 2012 in Dr Peto Says, What's New |
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Dogs may empathize with humans more than any other animal, including humans themselves, several new studies suggest.

The latest research, published in the journal Animal Cognition, found that pet dogs may truly be man (or woman’s) best friend if a person is in distress. That distressed individual does not even have to be someone the dog knows.

“I think there is good reason to suspect dogs would be more sensitive to human emotion than other species,” co-author Deborah Custance told Discovery News. “We have domesticated dogs over a long period of time. We have selectively bred them to act as our companions.”

“Thus,” she added,” those dogs that responded sensitively to our emotional cues may have been the individuals that we would be more likely to keep as pets and breed from.”

Custance and colleague Jennifer Mayer, both from the Department of Psychology at the University of London Goldsmiths College, exposed 18 pet dogs — representing different ages and breeds — to four separate 20-second human encounters. The human participants included the dogs’ fur parents as well as strangers.

During one experimental condition, the people hummed in a weird way. For that one, the scientists were trying to see if unusual behaviour itself could trigger canine concern. The people also talked and pretended to cry.

The majority of the dogs comforted the person, parent or not, when that individual was pretending to cry. The dogs acted submissive as they nuzzled and licked the person, the canine version of “there, there.” Custance and Mayer say this behaviour is consistent with empathic concern and the offering of comfort.

As for what could be going on in the dog’s head, yet another recent study, published in PLoS ONE, showed how the brains of dogs react as the canines view humans. In this case, the researchers trained dogs to respond to hand signals that meant the pups would receive a hot dog treat. Another signal meant no such treat was coming.

The caudate region of the dogs’ brains, an area associated with rewards in humans, showed activation when the canines knew a tasty food treat was coming.

“These results indicate that dogs pay very close attention to human signals,” lead researcher Gregory Berns, director of the Emory Center for Neuropolicy, explained. “And these signals may have a direct line to the dog’s reward system.”

In that study, the reward was food, but Custance and Mayer think canines over the thousands of years of domestication have been rewarded so much for approaching distressed human companions that this may somehow be hardwired into today’s dogs.

The phenomenon in some cases could even have a subconscious element. Consider what happens when a person yawns and a dog is in the room.

“Dogs show contagious yawning to human yawns,” Matthew Campbell, an assistant professor in Georgia State University’s Department of Psychology, told Discovery News.

He said that “we have selected dogs to be in tune with us emotionally.”

Custance and Mayer next hope to determine how empathetic wolves may be.

“It would be interesting to see how wolves who have been raised in human households would respond if they took part in our experiment,” Custance said. “Would they behave like domestic dogs or show less response to a crying human? It would be fascinating to find out.”

Adapted from Discovery Channel


Scientists Declare: Animals Are as Aware as Humans

Published August 26, 2012 in Love For Earthlings, What's New |
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An international group of prominent scientists has signed The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in which they are proclaiming their support for the idea that animals are conscious and aware to the degree that humans are — a list of animals that includes all mammals, birds, and even the octopus.

While it might not sound like much for scientists to declare that many non-human animals possess conscious states, it is the open acknowledgement that makes it big news here. The body of scientific evidence is increasingly showing that most animals are conscious in the same way that we are, and it is no longer something we can ignore.
It is also very interesting to note that the declaration is the group’s acknowledgement that consciousness can emerge in those animals, very much unlike humans, including those that evolved along different evolutionary tracks, namely birds and some encephalopods.

“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states,” they write. “Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviours.”
Consequently, say the signatories, the scientific evidence is increasingly indicating that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.

The group consists of cognitive scientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists — all of whom were attending the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and Non-Human Animals.

The declaration was signed in the presence of Stephen Hawking, and included such signatories as Christof Koch, David Edelman, Edward Boyden, Philip Low, Irene Pepperberg, and many more.

The declaration made the following observations:

  • The field of Consciousness research is rapidly evolving. Abundant new techniques and strategies for human and non-human animal research have been developed. Consequently, more data is becoming readily available, and this calls for a periodic re-evaluation of previously held preconceptions in this field. Studies of non-human animals have shown that homologous brain circuits correlated with conscious experience and perception can be selectively facilitated and disrupted to assess whether they are in fact necessary for those experiences. Moreover, in humans, new non-invasive techniques are readily available to survey the correlates of consciousness.
  • The neural substrates of emotions do not appear to be confined to cortical structures. In fact, subcortical neural networks aroused during affective states in humans are also critically important for generating emotional behaviours in animals. Artificial arousal of the same brain regions generates corresponding behaviour and feeling states in both humans and non-human animals. Wherever in the brain one evokes instinctual emotional behaviours in non-human animals, many of the ensuing behaviours are consistent with experienced feeling states, including those internal states that are rewarding and punishing. Deep brain stimulation of these systems in humans can also generate similar affective states. Systems associated with affect are concentrated in subcortical regions where neural homologies abound. Young human and non-human animals without neocortices retain these brain-mind functions. Furthermore, neural circuits supporting behavioural/ electrophysiological states of attentiveness, sleep and decision making appear to have arisen in evolution as early as the invertebrate radiation, being evident in insects and cephalopod mollusks (e.g., octopus).
  • Birds appear to offer, in their behaviour, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness. Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots. Mammalian and avian emotional networks and cognitive micro-circuitries appear to be far more homologous than previously thought. Moreover, certain species of birds have been found to exhibit neural sleep patterns similar to those of mammals, including REM sleep and, as was demonstrated in zebra finches, neurophysiological patterns, previously thought to require a mammalian neocortex. Magpies in articular have been shown to exhibit striking similarities to humans, great apes, dolphins, and elephants in studies of mirror self-recognition.
  • In humans, the effect of certain hallucinogens appears to be associated with a disruption in cortical feedforward and feedback processing. Pharmacological interventions in non-human animals with compounds known to affect conscious behaviour in humans can lead to similar perturbations in behaviour in non-human animals. In humans, there is evidence to suggest that awareness is correlated with cortical activity, which does not exclude possible contributions by subcortical or early cortical processing, as in visual awareness. Evidence that human and nonhuman animal emotional feelings arise from homologous subcortical brain networks provide compelling evidence for evolutionarily shared primal affective qualia.

    Read more about this here and here.
    This story originally appeared on io9.com.