Friday, March 29

Dogs are able to smell and detect human stress | Digital Trends Spanish


Popular belief dictates that dogs They can sense when you’re scared, and react to that with barking or attacking. Now a group of scientists from Queen’s University have identified that dogs can smell people’s stress. They published their findings in the magazine PLOS ONE.

It is already known that dogs can sniff out a range of chemical states. They can anticipate when someone is going to have a seizure or smell changes in blood sugar. Not only that, but they also act on these sightings, alerting their human with a nudge or snout.

Stress has its own chemosignal that comes from various physiological changes. The hormones cortisol and epinephrine spill into the bloodstream, resulting in an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration.

Participating humans provided breath and sweat samples on a gauze pad before and after performing one of the most stress-inducing tasks imaginable: mental math. The researchers instructed these poor souls to count backwards from 9,000 by intervals of 17, without a phone, pen, or paper.

The four dogs in the study were a cocker spaniel, a cockapoo, a mixed-breed lurcher, and a mixed-breed terrier.

The authors, after corroborating how dogs detect odors associated with stressful situations, have underlined that this finding, in addition to delving into the relationships between humans and dogs, could have important applications for the training of dogs capable of helping people suffering from anxiety or a stress disorder post-traumatic

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