Clara Wilson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and h

Dogs can smell people’s stress – new study

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2022-10-02 12:00:41

Clara Wilson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Dogs have a long history alongside humans, giving them an amazing ability to read human cues. Dogs also possess an incredible sense of smell, which enables them to detect diseases, such as COVID and lung cancer, in humans from odour alone. Whether dogs’ capabilities extend to detecting odours associated with psychological states has been explored far less.

When people are stressed, there are hormonal and nervous system changes that alter the kinds of odours produced by the body. My colleagues and I wanted to know if dogs can discriminate between odour samples taken from the same person before and after becoming stressed. To do this, we took ideas from the field of biomedical detection dogs (sniffer dogs in a laboratory setting) and combined these ideas with techniques used to test dogs’ perceptions of odours.

To test whether dogs could detect an odour associated with psychological stress, we attached sensors to the study participants to continuously measure their heart rate and blood pressure. Participants also rated how stressed they were feeling before and after taking part in the task.