Well-Behaved Dogs May Have Happier Owners | Hacker News Reader

Well-Behaved Dogs May Have Happier Owners

psychologytoday.com

49 pointswhatami45 comments

Alternatively:

People with spare time/money are happier

People with spare time/money can afford to put more time/money into their dog’s wellbeing.

It reminds me of an article saying women who owned horses lived longer than those who didn’t. Then it was pointed out that women who can afford horses are vastly more likely to have health insurance and/or access to better healthcare. Which obviously wouldn’t make as good a headline.

These factors are often controlled for (or attempted) in these sorts of studies.

I don’t see any reference to controls in the article (and the paper is paywalled, because obviously it would be :D).

That said reading more closely it’s a study of 36 people. 36 how does this get published? And then get an article???

I believe it was a group of 76 people - 36 had dogs with separation anxiety and 40 were okay.

The article can be summed up with this, "It is possible that humans with higher levels of stress do not have a relaxed relationship with their dogs."

This is what stress does and it's not only applicable to the dogs as I am sure friends, family and co-workers would also have less than a relaxed relationship with the individual.

36 who reported behavior problems, and 40 who did not. Veterinary medicine generally has small studies, because there's absolutely no money in veterinary medicine.

The authors note that for most of the variables people are talking about, the groups were pretty balanced. Which isn't surprising given they used snowball sampling for their recruitment - that's good at getting homogeneous groups.

Oops so 70 odd people. That’s still nowhere near reasonable to make the claims they’re making.

Being hard to get a decent sample size isn’t a justification for making unreasonable claims.

A few people have commented on the nature of the samples group (namely that they were homogenous, etc), but that’s not mentioned in the article, and the paper is behind a paywall. If you want a press release for your paper you need to make sure the relevant data is available to people who otherwise only have access to the article.

My wife is a dog breeder. My anecdotal sample size is getting close to the sample size of the study.

In one litter you will get such a large range of personalities even with same parents and being raised the same.

And then there’s such a big range of behaviours between the breeds. For example, weimaraners are predisposed to separation anxiety.

In addition, some owners adopt or rescue dogs who had bad experiences.

With the article behind a paywall, I’m guessing a sample size of 70 is way too small to come up with something insightful. How on earth could they come up with a “negative spiral” from the data. Sounds made up.

Anyway, I’ve stopped judging owners based on the behaviour of their dogs.

It's the same for children.

"If you want a press release for your paper you need to make sure the relevant data is available to people who otherwise only have access to the article." You're assuming the authors of the article have more than a modicum of control over what appears in an unrelated print magazine.

Having been on the end of that: They don't.

Also, 70 subjects is decently well powered for their analysis, which is actually pretty simple. It's not nearly what I'd prefer, but it's just a bunch of Mann-Whitney U tests and chi-squared tests of association.

"No significant differences were found in the sociodemographic variables, as listed in Table 1"

Those include age, marital status, education, and employment status.

Now if you wanted to criticize the paper you might pick that the study is out of 76 dogs total recruited by snowball sampling, which actually explains the homogenity of the study population.

Which makes sense, because there are very few veterinary medicine studies with large samples, because we don't fund vet. med.

Spare time is important, money not all. Homeless people (homeless due to circumstances or by choice) can have extremely well-behaved dogs. Gypsy groups, tribal people and wandering monks in India are examples I have seen.

The biggest lesson I got in dog training (which is really "owner training") was that the dog really wants to know what to do. So for example if my instructions were clear there was no ambiguity of what was expected. I suspect this is a big driver of the phenomenon.

The funny thing is I had a very very anxious breed of dog (an IWH) that people thought was docile and would not even notice that he was leashless even in a crowd or even crowded restaurant (and of course in the office). But it was simply that the dog was so used to my needs and wishes that he was comfortable in any situation -- or perhaps confident that I would not put him in a scary situation?

This story seems to have it backwards: well-rounded people train happier dogs.

Classic “tail wags the dog” reporting here, IMHO.

Well-behaved stories have happier writers.

You have that way round wrong. Classic wag dogging the tail, IMHO. It is well-behaved dogs have happier stories.

I disagree, it's wrong way dog. Classic round writer's stories dog happen to havers. Well-behaved round stories hog dogger doctors, have behaved dogger rounders.

Clickbait headlines have the happiest HN commenters :D

(I love you all :) )

The spacing around your parenthesized emoji made my night happy. Thank you.

Still wrong: People who are happier perceive their dogs to be well-behaved. People who are more anxious predictably have more anxiety about their dogs' behavior.

FTA: "This study looked only at the owners’ perceptions of separation-related behaviors and not a specific diagnosis of separation anxiety."

Also FTA: "The study is just a snapshot in time and does not show causality."

> People who are happier perceive their dogs to be well-behaved. People who are more anxious predictably have more anxiety about their dogs' behavior.

I think this might actually be it. As someone with anxiety I am irrationally anxious about my cat all the time, but according to external appraisal (i.e., the vet), my cat is just fine.

Wet streets cause rain. This hot on the tail of the Murray Gell-Mann amnesia post.

Certainly, with kids, it seems very apparent to me that my emotional state rubs off on them. I think there's a bigger feedback loop going on though. Obviously if they behave less well it makes me less happy too and it's easy to get into a vicious cycle.

I once worked in a place that held a 'Bring Your Dog To Work' day. The intriguing thing to me was that the dogs very much had the personalities of their owners, whether calm or anxious.

I've noticed that people look like their dogs, too.

Or do the dogs look like their owners? :)

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151111-why-do-dogs-look-li...

if you mean how obese they are, I have a friend who is very thin and super disciplined in his life, hates clutter, everything has its place, and his dog is super undisciplined and gigantic. Conversely, my dogs are borderline underweight and I am very strict about food intake and regular exercise, yet I could stand to lose a few pounds.

Well-behaved children may have happier parents as well.

Parents with no children are clearly happiest

People, I meant People.

But it’s such a broken sentence I’m leaving it for the ages :)

I thought you were making a joke which I didn't understand, having discounted the possibility that you meant parents of adult children or parents whose children had died.

Actually parents of children who have moved out would have been a great save, but I also thought it was hilariously dumb so left it there

As a parent and believer in the theory of evolution, I love seeing statements like this. Less competition for my offspring and my genes to propagate, yay!

Are you an egg/sperm donor? That's a freebie (possibly even paid) means to increase selection for your own genes...

I consider sperm and egg donation immoral for religious and ethical reasons.

When I was at Harvard in the 90s there were posters soliciting sperm donors all over campus. They explicitly listed height, appearance, and academic requirements.

If you have the traits clients are looking for it is probably the maximally fit male reproductive strategy short of going full Genghis Khan.

and have the smallest carbon footprint.

That cliche about "aspire to be the kind of person your dog thinks you are," rings true.

A friend of mine recently had a dog in the back seat while driving and the dog started to want to get attention from her. My friend turned to look at the dog which ended in rear-ending a car in front of her. Now she needs to spend more than 2k in insurance deductible as well as having to use Uber to commute. Nonetheless, she feels it is 100% her own fault and she's really happy that the dog wasn't injured.

That last sentence seems eminently reasonable all around.

Totally. And in the generalised version: Rear-ending is always your own fault. You hit the car in front of you, you were too close || too fast || not paying requisite attention.

The guy who was rear-ended is equally happy, I bet?

Pointing to the obvious here but would this also translate to children and then economically depressed communities (negative network effects anyone?)

Links to this and 3 other González-Ramírez papers on dogs/pets in the same journal:

http://libgen.io/scimag/index.php?s=Gonz%C3%A1lez-Ram%C3%ADr...

The Discussion and Conclusions of the actual paper, since my institution subscribes to the journal:

Discussion It is widely known that human-animal interaction is associated with positive health effects for humans, and for many years, its investigations had focused on this aspect (Fine, 2010). Nevertheless, dogs' unwanted behaviors could also have affect humans. This research focuses on owners’ perception about dog behavior when left alone and its association with their perceived stress and happiness.

We evaluated owners who believed that their dogs had separation-related problems and owners who perceived that their dogs were well behaved in their absence. After comparing the characteristics of both groups, as in McGreevy and Masters (2008) study, we did not detect a tendency related to breeds or an association related to their size. We found a significant difference between the groups according to the dog's time living with their actual owner: those owners who perceived that their dogs were well behaved when left alone had lived with their dogs longer.

Owners perceived that those dogs that did not present separation-related problems also had higher scores in trainability. This relationship may be explained by Tiira and Lohi (2015) findings that anxious dogs could be exercised less because these dogs may be less obedient or more prone to running away when walking.

Hyper- or over-attachment are typical descriptions in the literature regarding dogs with separation anxiety (Ogata, 2016). We found higher attachment scores within the group of owners who reported that their dogs had separation-related behavioral problems; however, attachment style should be considered (Parthasarathy and Crowell-Davis, 2006).

Results suggest that owners and dogs that share the same preferences in activities also share symptoms associated with stress. Dogs share many of the same environmental factors that contribute to anxiety in other species, such as humans (Tiira and Lohi, 2015).

Owners with higher levels of stress may not have a relaxed relationship with their dogs, which can contribute to their annoyance about their dogs' behavior, so they spend less time with them, increasing the anxiety in the dogs. In turn, a dog's behaviors may annoy the owner and may be a source of stress for him or her, which affects his or her perceived happiness.

Conclusion The findings of this study suggest that if owners do something to improve behaviors that they consider annoying in their dogs, their perceived happiness and dog-owner relationship could improve. Owners who perceive themselves as stressed also perceive separation-related problems in their dogs.

Does it work also for childs? Well behaved childs have happier parents ?

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