Dr. Holly Molinaro

So asking, showing people videos, pictures of dogs and asking them how they think that dog is feeling.

It's a little tricky because even as researchers, we don't 100% know how the dog might be feeling.

One way we do that is kind of try to understand just positive or negative emotions.

So giving a dog a treat, we can assume the dog is feeling some sort of positive way.

Uh, showing, yelling at a dog, saying you did something bad.

We can assume the dog is feeling some type of negative way.

So first we have to kind of induce a dog into that emotion.

And then we ask people, how do you think the dog is feeling?

Yeah, so with this study, we looked at mood.

So in the human, again, human literature, if you're in a good mood, you're more likely to see another person in a good mood.

If you're in a bad mood, you're more likely to see another person in a bad mood.

So we did the same thing.

What we did was we primed people, which essentially just means put them in a good or bad mood.

And we did that by showing them pictures of like, for happy, like a child at a birthday party.

For negative, it was like a car crash.

It's gruesome.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Or of course we have a neutral condition.

So people just like to like a teapot or something.