Canine emotional therapy

I had a rather terrifying nightmare last night, and as is usual with such things, the retelling doesn't convey how absolutely awful it was.

My wife and I were in a house -- not our own, it was one of those generic tasteful split-level homes you can see in every upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood in the United States.  From the furnishings it was occupied, and the owners obviously had children because there were toys scattered about.

Then the toys began to come to life.

It wasn't like Chucky in Child's Play, where it was a possessed doll that had an evil personality; it was more that they were being controlled remotely, and only looked like toys but were actually weapons.  After a struggle we fought our way past them, and at some point (don't recall how) we were able to deactivate them.  So we're trying to find the way out of the house, stepping over all the fallen toy/weapons, and then (of course) they started to reboot.

This was the moment when I was thrashing around so much that my wife woke me up.  I didn't scream or anything (that'll be relevant in a moment) but was flailing and had awakened her.  She reassured me that it was just a dream, we didn't have evil remote-controlled toys in our room, and I was able to shake the fear pretty quickly.

I got up to get a glass of water, and when I opened my bedroom door, my dog, Guinness, was standing there looking up at me with a concerned expression.

So I got my water, and he followed me back into the bedroom, jumped on the bed, and basically smooshed himself against me, his head under my chin.  I put my arm around him and he gave a big sigh and we both fell back asleep.

Why this is weird is that this was pretty un-Guinness-like behavior.  He's never allowed on our bed at night, mostly because he weighs seventy pounds and takes up a large amount of space.  We sleep with the door closed and he always spends the night quietly snoozing on his sofa.  (Yes, he has his own personal sofa.  Yes, I know he's ridiculously spoiled.)  Whenever I get up in the middle of the night -- not that unusual, because I'm an insomniac -- he virtually never budges, much less barging in and jumping in bed with me at two AM.  

So his behavior last night was very uncharacteristic, up to and including his basically draping himself over me once we got back into bed.  I know it may sound ridiculous, especially coming from a self-proclaimed rationalist skeptic -- but I swear, it seemed very much like he sensed that I'd had a bad scare and was upset, and wanted to comfort me.

Me with my valiant protector

What makes me curious, of course, is how he knew.  As I said, I hadn't shouted out.  The conversation my wife and I had after I woke up was quiet, and given that I recovered from my fright rather quickly, not at all agitated.  And when I got up to get my glass of water, he was already at the door waiting for me, so he must have known something was wrong, enough that it woke him up, and he decided to come and see if he could help.

Any dog owner will confirm that dogs are uniquely in tune with their owners' emotional states.  We had a brilliant, and rather loony, border collie named Doolin, who could sense when my wife was going to have a migraine and would essentially glue herself to Carol's side until it was over.  The odd thing was that Doolin knew before Carol did; in fact, Carol came to look at Doolin's odd behavior as a clue that she better find her migraine meds while she could still think straight and see what she was doing.  Another of our dogs, Grendel, always knew when we'd finished dinner.  We have a strict no-begging policy at meals, but once we're done, even if we're still seated at the table, they can come up for some petting and attention.  Grendel could infallibly tell when we were done eating, and seconds later would come loping in to get an ear rub.  We tried more than once to figure out what his cue was -- whether it was the sound of putting our silverware or glasses down, or something we said like, "That was good, thanks for cooking" -- but never could really pin it down.  But his appearance was like clockwork, every single night.

There have been some preliminary studies of dogs' abilities to recognize their owners' emotions from facial cues, with (in my mind) rather equivocal results.  One back in 2016, which appeared in Biology Letters of the Royal Society, looked at "equivalent valence" between a human's expression and the emotion conveyed in a recorded utterance -- how, for example, a dog might react to an angry face combined with a playfully-toned phrase.  It found that when the facial expression and the tone of the utterance had equivalent valence, the dog spent longer looking at the photograph than either when the valence was different, or when the photograph was shown with a recording of white noise.

A second, in 2018, looked at the difference in reaction when dogs were shown faces with various emotions simultaneously on two different monitors, one to the dogs' right, the other to the left.  It's been determined that dogs, like humans, have lateralized brains, with the two cerebral hemispheres performing complementary (rather than redundant) functions, and that (again like humans) they usually have dominant left hemispheres.  Because of this, the conjecture was that more intense emotions would cause the animals to pay more attention and turn their heads to the left, while less intense emotions would either show no preference or result in a rightward turn.

Sure enough, that's what happened.  Human faces showing fear, anger, and disgust caused a preferential leftward turn; a surprised face and a neutral expression caused a rightward turn (and also a shorter time looking at the photograph).  Additionally, the intense/negative faces caused the dogs to experience an increase in heart rate and signs of canine stress -- lowered tail, pulled back ears, and so on.  A surprising result was that a happy face caused a leftward turn.  One possibility is that humans' smiles are a fairly uncommon way of expressing relaxation and happiness in the animal world; for most species, baring the teeth is a threat, not a gesture of friendship.  It's also possible that the dog was reacting because of the intensity of the expression, not its actual emotional content.  Impossible to tell.

Those experiments, though, are pretty broad-brush.  What I've found in my long years of being a dog owner is how attuned they are to the specific gestures and actions of their owners, when the same gesture or action from someone else would cause no response at all.  Our aforementioned border collie, Doolin, was a phenomenal frisbee-catcher -- but only when my wife was throwing it.  When Carol threw the frisbee, Doolin always took off in exactly the right direction, and nailed maybe 95% of the throws with a spectacular leaping catch in mid-air.  With me, she was equally likely to run pretty much any direction, and missed most of the throws.  Like with Grendel's "dinner's over" cues, we tried like hell to figure out what Doolin was picking up about my wife's body language when she threw the frisbee that I couldn't seem to duplicate, and never did figure it out.

So I'm back to where I started, which is simply an anecdotal sense that dogs are exquisitely sensitive to their owners' emotional states.  I've noted that when I'm feeling low Guinness is much more likely to spend the day snoozing at my feet rather than on His Personal Sofa, but I don't know whether that's because of his sensitivity, because of dart-thrower's bias, or simply my reading more into his behavior than what's actually there.  In any case, it's a curious phenomenon, and worthy of more study.  In the interim, I'd love to hear my readers' dog stories -- feel free to post your experiences of your dogs picking up on your feelings in the comments section.  Or, conversely, feel free to tell me I'm full of malarkey.  Don't worry, it won't bother me, Guinness will be right there to make me feel better.

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Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert established her reputation as a cutting-edge observer of the human global impact in her wonderful book The Sixth Extinction (which was a Skeptophilia Book of the Week a while back).  This week's book recommendation is her latest, which looks forward to where humanity might be going.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is an analysis of what Kolbert calls "our ten-thousand-year-long exercise in defying nature," something that immediately made me think of another book I've recommended -- the amazing The Control of Nature by John McPhee, the message of which was generally "when humans pit themselves against nature, nature always wins."  Kolbert takes a more nuanced view, and considers some of the efforts scientists are making to reverse the damage we've done, from conservation of severely endangered species to dealing with anthropogenic climate change.

It's a book that's always engaging and occasionally alarming, but overall, deeply optimistic about humanity's potential for making good choices.  Whether we turn that potential into reality is largely a function of educating ourselves regarding the precarious position into which we've placed ourselves -- and Kolbert's latest book is an excellent place to start.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Talk to the hand

I used to tease my poor, long-suffering mother because of her habit of talking with her hands.

It wasn't even necessarily when the person she was talking to was physically there in the room with her.  She talked with her hands (well, with one hand) while she was on the phone.

"Mom, they can't see you," I told her.

"I know," she said in an exasperated tone.  "I can't help it."

I got my comeuppance when I started teaching, and a student -- more than one, actually -- pointed out my habit of sculpting the air while I was explaining something.  One of them challenged me to deliver a lecture with my hands clasped behind my back.

That lasted approximately two minutes, much to the class's amusement.

So Mom, if you're listening right now, you get the last laugh.  I don't know that I can explain it any better than you did, but if I sit on my hands, I become completely tongue-tied.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wikimania2009 Beatrice Murch, Talking with the hands, CC BY 3.0]

Apparently it's more or less universal, and the reason may be more than just introducing expressive body language into our conversation.  A study from the University of Connecticut released this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that hand gestures change the quality and intonation of our voices -- therefore communicating subtle information even if the listener can't see what our hands are doing.

In "Acoustic Information About Upper Limb Movement in Voicing," by Wim Pouw, Alexandra Paxton, Steven J. Harrison, and James A. Dixon, we read about a simple experiment -- volunteers were instructed to make a continuous vowel tone ("aaaaaaa....") into a microphone, simultaneously making rhythmic motions with the arms, while listeners in another room tried to synchronize their own arm movements with those of the vocalizers.

The ability to do that was nearly universal, even though the changes in the tonal quality were very subtle.

The authors write:

Co-speech gestures, no matter what they depict, further closely coordinate with the melodic aspects of speech known as prosody.  Specifically, gesture’s salient expressions (e.g., sudden increases in acceleration or deceleration) tend to align with moments of emphasis in speech.  Recent computational models trained on associations of gesture and speech acoustics from an individual have succeeded in producing very natural-looking synthetic gestures based on novel speech acoustics from that same individual, suggesting a very tight (but person-specific) relation between prosodic–acoustic information in speech and gestural movement.  Such research dovetails with remarkable findings that speakers in conversation who cannot see and only hear each other tend to synchronize their postural sway (i.e., the slight and nearly imperceptible movement needed to keep a person upright).

Because the entire skeletomuscular system is connected, movement of the arms and hands alters the shape/position of the chest cavity and throat, creating small changes in our vocal quality.  That, apparently, is enough to convey information to our listener, even if they can't see the gestures.

"Some language researchers don't like this idea, because they want language to be all about communicating the contents of your mind, rather than the state of your body," said study co-author James Dixon. "But we think that gestures are allowing the acoustic signal to carry additional information about bodily tension and motion.  It's information of another kind."

So add this to the long list of subtleties affecting our communications.  I still remember my Intro to Linguistics professor telling us about tonal languages like Thai, in which the pitch and/or pitch changes in vocalizing a syllable change its meaning, and he asked if we thought information in English was altered by changes in tone or stress.  One person came up with the rising pitch at the end of a sentence communicating a question, and increasing stress to indicate emphasis, but that was about it.

"Really?" he said.  "Then tell me why the following all mean something different."  And he read us this list of sentences:

• She gave the money to him today?
• She gave the money to him today?
• She gave the money to him today?
• She gave the money to him today?
• She gave the money to him today?

Minor alterations in the way a sentence is uttered can entirely change the meaning of the words.

I guess I shouldn't have picked on my mom for talking with her hands.  Human communication is complex, and what we end up saying to our listeners can depend on a great many things beyond the exact words used.  So be careful how your hand moves when you're talking to a friend on the telephone.

You may be telling them more than you realize.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is six years old, but more important today than it was when it was written; Richard Alley's The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future.  Alley tackles the subject of proxy records -- indirect ways we can understand things we weren't around to see, such as the climate thousands of years ago.

The one he focuses on is the characteristics of glacial ice, deposited as snow one winter at a time, leaving behind layers much like the rings in tree trunks.  The chemistry of the ice gives us a clear picture of the global average temperature; the presence (or absence) of contaminants like pollen, windblown dust, volcanic ash, and so on tell us what else might have contributed to the climate at the time.  From that, we can develop a remarkably consistent picture of what the Earth was like, year by year, for the past ten thousand years.

What it tells us as well, though, is a little terrifying; that the climate is not immune to sudden changes.  In recent memory things have been relatively benevolent, at least on a planet-wide view, but that hasn't always been the case.  And the effect of our frantic burning of fossil fuels is leading us toward a climate precipice that there may be no way to turn back from.

The Two-Mile Time Machine should be mandatory reading for the people who are setting our climate policy -- but because that's probably a forlorn hope, it should be mandatory reading for voters.  Because the long-term habitability of the planet is what is at stake here, and we cannot afford to make a mistake.

As Richard Branson put it, "There is no Planet B."

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The voice of truth

Having been a blogger for seven years -- the fact of which I find a little astonishing -- I am well aware of the difficulty of coming across with the right emotional tone in writing.

Especially given the fraught nature of many of the topics I address, I'm sure that my words sometimes elicit strong emotions.  (Cf. the post I did a couple of days ago on hate mail.)  In some cases, the ire is probably justified; perhaps I stepped on your toes about some dearly-held belief of yours, which is bound to raise people's hackles.

On the other hand, I am often afraid that what I'm saying will be misconstrued, not because of the words themselves, but because of the inherent deficiency of the written word in representing the writer's motivations and emotional content accurately.  It's why emails so often generate misunderstandings; it's also why people often feel freer to be nasty online than face-to-face.  When we lack the visual cues of people's facial expressions and body language, we not only are more prone to misinterpreting what people's words mean, we sometimes feel less inhibited about saying things we'd never dream of saying if the person was standing right in front of us.

But apparently you don't even need to see the person's face to diminish this tendency.  A recent experiment by Juliana Schroeder of the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley, and Michael Kardas and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, has shown that all you need to add is a voice.

In "The Humanizing Voice: Speech Reveals, and Text Conceals, a More Thoughtful Mind in the Midst of Disagreement," that appeared at PubMed a couple of weeks ago, the researchers showed that you're more receptive to viewpoints you disagree with, and less judgmental about the people stating them, if you hear those statements spoken rather than simply reading them in text form.

The authors write:

A person's speech communicates his or her thoughts and feelings.  We predicted that beyond conveying the contents of a person's mind, a person's speech also conveys mental capacity, such that hearing a person explain his or her beliefs makes the person seem more mentally capable-and therefore seem to possess more uniquely human mental traits-than reading the same content.  We expected this effect to emerge when people are perceived as relatively mindless, such as when they disagree with the evaluator's own beliefs.  Three experiments involving polarizing attitudinal issues and political opinions supported these hypotheses.  A fourth experiment identified paralinguistic cues in the human voice that convey basic mental capacities.  These results suggest that the medium through which people communicate may systematically influence the impressions they form of each other.  The tendency to denigrate the minds of the opposition may be tempered by giving them, quite literally, a voice.

Which is fascinating, if a little unsurprising.  After all, we are social primates, and we evolved in a context of living in groups in which communication was always face-to-face.  We're exquisitely sensitive to subtleties of expression (nicknamed microexpressions), often on a completely subconscious level.  Experiments have shown that we use minor cues such as pupil dilation size to make judgments about attractiveness, and the imperceptibly tiny back-and-forth movements of the eye called microsaccades can give you information about emotional state and what you're paying attention to (even if you're trying to hide that fact).

[image courtesy of photographer Lydia Icerko and the Wikimedia Commons]

And as far as voices go, small differences of inflection can provide huge cues as to what the speaker's intent was.  Consider the following phrase: "She gave the money to him."  Now speak the words aloud, but the first time put the emphasis on the word "she," then on "gave," then on "money," then on "him."

Each one has a different implication, doesn't it?

So if we're reading what someone's written, we're losing access to the cues that might tell us such important information as what the person's motivations and emotional state was when they wrote it.  It's no wonder this leads to frequent misjudgments.  We're trying to parse a person's words based on incomplete data.

This should make us a little more cautious about deciding that we know what people mean when we read an email -- or a blog post.  Clear communication is one thing, and (being a writer) I'm all for that.  But no matter how clear we are, we're never going to be able to communicate emotional depth via the written word as well as we can in person.

So if you think your favorite blogger is being an asshole sometimes, you might want to give him the benefit of the doubt.