CHow can we not mention the legendary scene from the Disney animated film 101 Dalmatians, the one in which Pongo watches a series of walking dogs with their human lookalikes? Pairs of females of different but very similar species parade. The cartoon takes to extremes an impression that one often has when faced with a man-dog couple. Scientific research has been applied to the question, trying to understand whether animals really resemble their owners. Or if, more simply, we notice the rare times the similarity is there and ignore when it isn’t.
Like dog, like owner? It’s not an impression
Psychologist Yana Bender and her colleagues at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany decided to investigate. They recently conducted a systematic review of studies investigating similarities in dog-human dyads and they found that people actually look like their dogs more often than chance might predict.
And not only in physical characteristics but also in personality and behavior. Their research, which analyzed 15 studies, was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Not only that 101 Dalmatians. Also several photographic projects, from that of Paolo Carlini (“Master Dogs”) to that of the British photographer Gerrard Gethings, they tried to play on these recurring similarities. With surprising, exhilarating, suggestive effects.
Let’s choose the dog that most resembles us, says science
But let’s go back to the search for Yana Bender. Several studies among those analyzed focused on the fact that, mostly, if you ask a person to match images of dogs to images of owners it is easy for them to guess. Let him understand by eye which human being owns a certain animal based on the similarity. In one casethe participants even managed to match dogs to the correct owners with only images of their eyes. Again, to put it objectively, overweight dogs have owners with a high BMI.
Two hypotheses could explain these similarities. The first is that humans choose dogs that look like them. So, for example, women with long hair express a greater preference for long-eared dog breeds, such as beagles and Springer Spaniels. While those with short hair tend to prefer short-eared dog breeds, such as Siberian huskies. Just like in general people prefer things that are familiar to them.
A phenomenon that «it resembles the way we search for our partners», he summarizes Yana Benderto say, once again, how between man and furry there is “a very close relationship… comparable to many human relationships”.
The similarity increases with time
The second possibility is that dogs and humans become more similar in appearance over time. If this were true, however, humans should become more like their dogs the longer they have owned them. This appears not to be the case: people’s ability to match owners to their fur babies in photographs does not change based on this parameter, apart from being overweight.
The influence of man on the personality of the dog
The similarities between dogs and their owners don’t end with appearance. Bender and his colleagues found numerous studies that showed Significant correlations between dogs and their owners on all five major personality dimensions: neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. Extroverted owners tend to report that their dogs are outgoing and the dogs are also observed to display more sociable behavior. Dog owners who considered themselves emotionally unstable had dogs that showed higher rates of aggression towards their owners and greater fear directed at strangers.
This is how emotional mirroring evolves
The emotional mirroring between pets and owners then seems to evolve over timeand to the satisfaction of humans when they feel they are similar to their four-legged friends in terms of personality and behavior. In this case, the easy comparison is with raising children. On the topic Borbála Turcsánresearcher at the ELTE Faculty of Science in Hungary, found that while about a third of a dog’s personality depends on genetic factors, another two thirds are determined by the environment in which it lives, which is largely shaped by the owner if they have been together for many years.
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