By means of Martin Leduc
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Dog owners know this: coming home from work, shopping, or any outing means a house party.
The dog jumps everywhere, its tail moves in all directions, twists itself, barks… When they are small, it happens that puppies urinate with excitement.
Consider that in addition to all these visible manifestations, dogs can also shed some tears of joy when they look for us.
In any case, this was confirmed by a very serious study conducted by Kaori Murata, Miho Nagasawa, Tatsushi Onaka, Nobuyuki Kanemaki, Shigeru Nakamura, Kazuo Tsubota, Kazutaka Mogi and Takefumi Kikusui, researchers from the University of Azabu. , in Japan.
To prove this, scientists did the Schirmer’s test. Basically, they just put pieces of blotting paper under the dog’s eyes.
In doing so, they observed the reactions of the dog – and the results of the strip – with people they knew, but had no particular connection, and with their master.
“The number of tears increases significantly when dogs face their handlers,” the researchers said in the study report.
Facilitate emotional connections
But how to explain that dogs cry with joy? It may sound strange, but scientists have a ready hypothesis to answer the question: “These results suggest that Tears facilitate emotional connection between man and dog.
And to prove it, the researchers conducted two additional experiments.
In another test, they applied a solution containing oxytocin (basically the love hormone) before the meeting. And the number of tears increased significantly, according to the results of the study.
“It suggests that Oxytocin can cause these tears during meetings,” said the researchers.
The second experiment is aimed at owners. Researchers asked human participants to rate their impressions of photos of dogs. Whether they want to be taken care of or not. In some, dogs with tears and others without (artificial tears, for the experiment).
“And subjects gave higher scores to pictures of crying dogs. This suggests that Tears facilitate emotional connection between man and dog”, satisfied the researchers.
Like when a child is crying and his mother or father runs to give him attention.
These positive emotions stimulate the production of tears
According to them, this is the “first report of positive emotions evoking tearing in non-human subjects”.
According to the study, this is definitely related to the fact that dogs, unlike most other animals, have evolved or been domesticated through communication with humans, and therefore have has acquired capacity in this direction.
Although some animals show excitement when they see people with whom they have had a positive past, there is no danger of seeing them cry during the reunion.
Well, who knows? The animals probably have a few more surprises in store for us.
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