Feeling stressed? Your dog can smell it on your breath

DOGS, it is claimed, can read their owners’ emotions – and now it seems they can smell them too.

A study suggests the pets can pick up the scent of stress on human sweat and breath.

Researchers collected samples from 36 people before and after they undertook a difficult maths problem. Those whose blood pressure and heart rate had increased were then presented to the dogs to sniff, and all four chosen animals – Treo, Fingal, Soot and Winnie – were able to correctly identify the stress specimens.

Clara Wilson, a PhD student in the School of Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast, said: ‘The research highlights that dogs do not need visual or audio cues to pick up on human stress. This is the first study of its kind and it provides evidence that dogs can smell stress from breath and sweat alone, which could be useful when training service and therapy dogs.’

Each dog was given one person’s relaxed and stressed samples, taken only four minutes apart. The findings, published in the Plos One journal, revealed that in every test session all of the dogs were able to correctly alert the researchers to each person’s stress sample.