When it comes to human suffering, I believe nearly all of us instinctively exercise compassion and assistance. When our family experienced a tragedy and were all grieving, our Livi clearly focused her attention on the person at the center of the grief. She literally sat on his lap (which was unusual) and would not leave his side for two days. She did it instinctively without any prompting from us. It was poignant, and it caused me to do some extra research into how dogs pick up on human emotion.
Can Schnauzers Sense Pain, Grief, and Depression? While Schnauzers don’t fully comprehend emotions like humans do, they can detect drops in human serotonin and dopamine levels and may respond in what seem to be comforting ways. Research also indicates that dogs can detect differences in positive and negative human sounds.
Even if compassion isn’t involved in a dog’s reaction to human emotions, their incredible sense of smell and hearing may also give them a sensory advantage in reacting instinctively to our suffering.
We tend to “anthropomorphize” our dogs, meaning that we attribute many human traits to them even if they don’t exist. However, when it comes to having compassion and being alert to human suffering, our canine friends seem to have at least the heightened sensory skills to support us through troubled times.
Let’s talk about the ways that our Schnauzers can pick up on human emotions, especially painful experiences such as pain, grief, and depression.
How Do Schnauzers Pick Up on Human Emotion?
Even if Schnauzers don’t experience the range and depth of human emotions, they do experience reality and their environment in ways that we are still trying to understand. You might want to read my article What Are Schnauzer Senses Like? (Compared to Humans) for some insight.
Canine senses really seem to give them some significant advantages when it comes to interacting with us in meaningful, supportive ways. They take in, and interpret the world around them, in several intriguing ways.
Schnauzers Learn by Observation
Schnauzers are intelligent and they can learn quickly from observing, listening, and watching what humans do. We tend to use fairly consistent body language and facial expressions when expressing emotion. These physical cues, even subtle ones, are available for your Schnauzer’s keen sense of observation.
Human body language is vital when communicating with your Schnauzer, and the study of social cognition tells us that animals of all types are wired to pick up on social cues. While it’s normal for humans to be expected to pick up on cues from their fellow human beings, it has become clear that dogs, too, are very good at learning social cues and body language.
Through their superb senses and overall capable cognition, Schnauzers are able to pick up on our cues and respond to them.
THE sCHNAUZER COLLECTIVE
In fact, anthropologist Robert Hare and his team of researchers at Harvard University demonstrated that dogs are better at interpreting human body language and social cues than other animals. Dogs consistently read human social cues better than wolves raised by humans, chimpanzees, and even three-year-old human children!
Schnauzers are very capable at pairing human body language and facial expressions with both verbal and non-verbal human sounds to distinguish emotions. This ability is one reason that training Schnauzers is relatively easy, and it is also helpful when it comes to sensing human pain, grief, and depression.
Schnauzers Can Smell Changes in Body Chemistry
The canine sense of smell is incredibly powerful compared to that of human beings. Unlike humans who depend on their sight to interpret the world, dogs depend on their noses. In fact, your Schnauzer’s sense of smell is 10,000 to 100,000 times stronger than yours.
Additionally, Schnauzers have about 300 million olfactory receptors, while a human being has just 5 million receptors. The sheer number of olfactory receptors make canines useful when it comes to hunting and drug-sniffing, but their incredible sense of smell also gives them an unparalleled gift for detecting the chemical components of human emotions.
They have two different air passages, one is for breathing, and the other is for smelling. The vomeronasal organ, or Jacobson’s organ, in your Schnauzer’s nasal cavity and in the upper portion of the mouth, helps her smell things that are not visible, such as body chemistry changes in human beings.
Smelling Negative Emotions
Dogs cannot talk, but their noses are a tool of communication. Every human being has a unique scent, which is what canines use to distinguish one person from the other. When an individual is frightened, scared, or stressed, they release adrenaline. Schnauzers can easily pick up the smell of this hormone and interpret the situation. Additionally, anxiousness increases blood flow and heart rate, which transports body chemicals to the surface of the skin.
In addition, Schnauzers can detect drops in the “feel good” hormones serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin. Drops to below-than-normal levels of these hormones seem to signal to our canine friends that something is wrong.
Grief, pain, depression, and overall sadness are emotions associated with biochemical changes that your Schnauzer can literally sense. Her reaction may vary depending on her own experiences with stress and environment. She may want to be with you very often and appear to be comforting you, or she might retreat and sleep a lot or become lethargic. You will want to be aware of your Schnauzer’s behavior and her reaction to the range of human emotions she is exposed to. My article Is My Schnauzer Stressed (How to Tell and What to Do) might be a good resource.
Overall, though, Schnauzers are very loving breeds and have a natural affinity for supporting their human families. Moreover, dogs in general seem to have a deep capacity for reading human behavior and reacting in positive, helpful ways.
Smelling Disease
The area of your Schnauzer’s brain dedicated to decoding scents is about 40 times greater than that of human beings.
Sometimes, drops in hormones or other biochemical changes can indicate physical disease. Read my article Can Schnauzers Smell Human Disease for more detailed information.
Generally, the level of these hormones drops rapidly when an individual is sick and, as a result, dogs can often tell when someone is ill. The human body produces multiple chemical odors that travel through the bloodstream into urine, sweat, and breath.
For example, Schnauzers can smell isoprene found in human breath. High levels of isoprene accompany hypoglycemia in individuals with Type I diabetes. Lack of enough sugars in human blood could lead to weakness in joints, fatigue, and disorientation. A combination of these symptoms may cause a seizure if the patient does not receive an immediate sugar boost.
Once they smell high levels of isoprene, diabetes-sniffing dogs warn their owners of impending danger. They give the warning by barking, wiggling their tails, lying down, or simply placing their paws on the person. You might be interested in my article Can Schnauzers Be Therapy or Service Dogs.
Schnauzer’s Can “Hear” Human Emotion
Dogs can also comprehend tonal variations in human beings. A friendly tone will help your Schnauzer feel comfortable enough to be around a person. However, when someone is depressed, she can pick up on the variations in tone, even if there are no words actually spoken.
We know that Schnauzers are intelligent, but as canine research continues, we are finding that dogs in general may actually be able to “hear” human emotion in ways we’ve never imagined.
Past studies have demonstrated that dogs can match happy faces with happy vocalizations and angry faces with angry vocalizations.
But even when dogs only use their hearing, recent research has found that canines can tell the difference between positive and negative emotions expressed through human vocalizations (not necessarily words). For example, dogs can distinguish between the positive sound of laughter and the negative sound of crying.
The Study on Hearing Emotion
The Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Bari Aldo Moro in southern Italy researched this very skill. Like humans, dogs use both sides of their brains. Canines use the right side of their brain to control the left side of their body and visa versa. In addition, canines tend to process positive emotions with the left side of their brain and process negative emotions with the right side of their brain.
Their study tested 30 dogs to determine whether they could differentiate between positive and negative nonverbal human sounds with no visual cues (such as a human face). The test was designed to see if the dogs could distinguish between positive sounds such as laughing, and negative sounds such as screaming and crying.
| The Study Set-Up | One at a time, each dog was served food in the center of the testing room, with two speakers evenly spaced on either side. While each dog ate, the speakers broadcast both positive and negative nonverbal human vocalizations (laughing, screaming, and crying) and each dog’s reaction was videotaped. Remember that dogs process positive emotions with the left side of their brain, and negative emotions with the right side of their brain. As such, the test was set up to record whether the dogs turned to the right or left upon hearing the human sounds. The direction in which they turned to hear the sounds would indicate which side of the brain processed the sound and whether it was interpreted as positive or negative. |
| The Results | The results were pretty remarkable! Upon hearing sounds such as laughing, each dog turned his head to the right, indicating that they processed the sound with the left side of their brain and interpreted the sound as positive. The opposite was also true. Upon hearing either crying or screaming, each dog turned his head to the left, indicating that they processed the sound with the right side of their brain and interpreted the sound as negative. |
| The Implications | This type of research will continue, but these results tell us that our canine friends have very finely tuned senses. Whether a sense like hearing has developed to interpret positive and negative sounds innately or by living with humans, it’s clear that this ability helps them live in (and respond to) highly social situations, even when those situations involve another species….like us. |
While research will continue and will seek to understand how dogs think and behave, many results seem to confirm what humans have experienced firsthand for centuries: dogs really are man’s best friend.
Schnauzers, in particular, are very loving and tend to thrive within the complexities of human relationships and emotions. Through their superb senses and overall capable cognition, they are able to pick up on our cues and respond to them. In short, Schnauzers can definitely sense pain, grief, and depression…and we all benefit from their sensory gifts.