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Timmy's in the Well: Empathy and Prosocial Helping in Dogs Emily M Macalester College DigitalCommons@Macalester College Psychology Honors Projects Psychology Department Spring 2017 Timmy's in the Well: Empathy and Prosocial Helping in Dogs Emily M. Sanford Macalester College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/psychology_honors Part of the Comparative Psychology Commons Recommended Citation Sanford, Emily M., "Timmy's in the Well: Empathy and Prosocial Helping in Dogs" (2017). Psychology Honors Projects. 42. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/psychology_honors/42 This Honors Project is brought to you for free and open access by the Psychology Department at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in Psychology Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Running head: EMPATHY AND HELPING IN DOGS 1 Timmy’s in the Well: Empathy and Prosocial Helping in Dogs Emily Sanford Adviser: Dr. Julia Manor, Psychology Spring 2017 EMPATHY AND HELPING IN DOGS 2 Abstract Dogs are thought to empathetically evaluate humans’ emotional states, and attend more to crying people than humming people (Custance & Mayer, 2012). However, whether dogs are empathetically motivated to provide help to humans in need is unclear. This study used a trapped-other paradigm, modified from use in research on rats, to study prosocial helping in dogs (Ben-Ami Bartal et al., 2011). A human trapped behind a door either cried or hummed, and the dog’s behavior and physiological responses, including opening and distress behaviors and heart rate variability, were recorded. Then, dogs participated in an impossible task to evaluate the strength of their emotional bond with their owner (D’Aniello et al., 2015). This study found that dogs can help humans. Dogs in the distress condition opened at the same frequency, but significantly more quickly, than dogs in the neutral condition. Behavioral coding suggests that opening may have been motivated by different mechanisms in the distress and neutral conditions. Openers in the distress condition may have been motivated by an empathetic evaluation of the owner’s emotional state with sufficient suppression of one’s personal distress. In the neutral condition, opening was not related to the emotional response and may have instead been motivated by curiosity or a desire for social contact. Results from the impossible task suggest that dogs with strong bonds to their owner are more likely to behave empathetically toward them, which is consistent with the tendency of empathy to increase with familiarity (Cialdini et al., 1997). Keywords: empathy, prosocial, heart rate variability EMPATHY AND HELPING IN DOGS 3 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I am incredibly thankful to my advisor, Professor Julia Manor, who has been instrumental in the development of my academic and research interests at Macalester College. Julia was the advisor for my first ever research project, so it is fitting that she also guided me through the completion of my honors research. Her eye for interesting scientific questions, dedication to the pursuit of knowledge, resilience in the face of challenging data, and unwavering support have been of the utmost importance as I developed my love for psychological research. I also need to thank Professor Brooke Lea. After joining his lab during my junior year, my skills as a researcher and critical thinker have expanded exponentially. My experiences working with Brooke have shaped the way that I approach research questions and tackle challenging problems in the lab. I also owe the discovery of my research interests for graduate school to his keen interventions. I definitively would not be where I am today, with the successes that I have achieved and the future I have to look forward to, without his help and guidance. The other professor whom I want to thank, and who has also been instrumental to the development of my academic interests, is Professor Chad Topaz. Since my very first semester at Macalester, Chad has been both an incredible professor as well as a reliable and caring mentor. My ability to integrate mathematics and computational thinking into my pursuit of the psychological sciences is thanks to Chad’s enthusiasm, both for the subject itself and for the continued development of my mathematical mind. This project would never have been accomplished without the help of my incredible collaborators: Emma Burt, who helped to design, run, analyze, and present the study; Malini Sharma, who was an incredibly generous volunteer of her time for data collection and video EMPATHY AND HELPING IN DOGS 4 coding; and Rainah Ward and Ali Laske, without whom the dogs would have been impossible to wrangle, and the study would have been impossible to run. I also need to thank my reviewers, Professors Mark Davis and Eric Wiertelak, for their willingness to review my research and provide insight into how it could be improved. Finally, I would like to thank my roommates, friends, and incredible family (and our dogs!) for always being supportive and continually convincing me that everything will always get done. Their love and encouragement have kept me afloat, and I am so blessed to have them all in my life. I also have to thank the good good goof-boys, the McElroy brothers, whose silliness, creativity, and sincerity have made them a constant source of light and amusement when I need them most. Great job! EMPATHY AND HELPING IN DOGS 5 Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. 2 Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 7 The Evolution of Empathy .......................................................................................................... 7 Empathy in Primates ................................................................................................................. 10 Empathy in Rats and the Trapped-Other Paradigm................................................................... 11 Empathy in Dogs ....................................................................................................................... 16 Prosocial Helping in Dogs ......................................................................................................... 18 Heart Rate Variability ............................................................................................................... 21 Present Study ............................................................................................................................. 28 Method ............................................................................................................................. 31 Subjects ..................................................................................................................................... 31 Apparatus and Materials ............................................................................................................ 31 Prosocial Helping Task ............................................................................................................. 32 Impossible Task ......................................................................................................................... 34 Behavioral Ethogram ................................................................................................................. 35 Data Processing ......................................................................................................................... 36 Results .............................................................................................................................. 38 Helping ...................................................................................................................................... 39 Stress Behaviors ........................................................................................................................ 39 Heart Rate Variability ............................................................................................................... 41 Heart Rate Variability and Stress Behaviors ............................................................................. 42 Impossible Task ......................................................................................................................... 44 Discussion......................................................................................................................... 45 References ........................................................................................................................ 57 Figures .............................................................................................................................. 64 EMPATHY AND HELPING IN DOGS 6 EMPATHY AND HELPING IN DOGS 7 Timmy’s in the Well: Empathy and Prosocial Helping in Dogs Group survival in social organisms is dependent on prosocial behavior and empathy because they facilitate sociality, where animals’ abilities to interact, cooperate, and coordinate are contingent upon their ability to perceive and adopt each other’s emotional states (de Waal, 2008). Empathy is the emotional response that allows an individual to align
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