When you returned home from summer vacation,Cheating wife movies your dog might have leapt out the door, jumped on you, and licked your face. And that's not all.
The emotions gushing inside your dog could make its eyes wet, says a new study recently published in the science journal Current Biology.
Researchers suggest the love hormone oxytocin drives this tear secretion. Mammals, like dogs, release oxytocinwhile bonding with their babies. The lead author Takefumi Kikusui is a dog parent himself, and noticed that his poodle’s eyes become watery when it nursed its puppies.
"That gave me the idea that oxytocin might increase tears. So, we performed a reunion experiment with the owners," said Kikusui, who is a veterinary medicine professor at Azabu University in Japan.
SEE ALSO: Dogs are smarter than you thinkFor the test, veterinarians folded a strip into the dog’s lower eyelid and temporarily clasped it there, which is commonly done to diagnose dry eyes in dogs. The strip measures tears that are already there, tears that are secreted because of the strip itself (which slightly irritates the eyes), and tear secretion that happens apart from the irritation.
To be certain if dogs really produced tears because of affinity with their owners, and not anyone else, the researchers also included people who the dogs were familiar with, but not their owners. The tear volume increased significantly when the dogs met their owners, and not when they met their acquaintances. They also applied oxytocin solution to the dogs’ eyes and found tear secretion levels went up even more. The researchers used around 20 dogs in each of the experiments.
"I think this is potentially a groundbreaking experiment, simple and clever."
"I think this is potentially a groundbreaking experiment, simple and clever," Miiamaaria Kujala, a cognitive neuroscience professor at the University of Helsinki in Finland, told Mashable. Kujala was not involved in the recent study.
Nobody previously thought to conduct this kind of experiment on tear volume before, because dogs or other animals don’t often cry visibly, she explained. But the scientific community will have to repeat this experiment in the future to confirm this finding, Kujala cautions.
The study also found that the dogs' teary eyes triggered more caregiving in humans. The researchers asked participants to rate their impressions of photos of dogs with artificial tears, asking how much they wanted to care for dogs. They ranked dog photos with artificial tears higher than those dogs without tears.
Want more scienceand tech news delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories newslettertoday.
As this new canine research suggests, dog tears could serve the purpose of stoking human caregiving. But Kikusui mentions another possibility: producing tears might serve as a communication tool. Some mammals, including humans, can produce "pheromones" in tears. Pheromones are chemical signals that transmit different types of information between animals, Kikusui said.
Dog cognition is an emerging area of research. There are several theories why dogs grow so close to humans, and why they read human behavior so well, Kujala said. One of them is that dogs were an early domesticated species. "Our friendship with dogs has outdated the development of agriculture," she said.
(Editor: {typename type="name"/})
The cicadas aren't invading the U.S.
Jack Dorsey says Twitter's 'left
This viral Twitter story is the perfect reminder that it's never too late to chase a dream
Camila Cabello tweeted the best reply to her 2012 self after winning at the VMAs
Reality Distortion Field: 10 Things Apple Won't Directly Say But We'll Infer About the iPhone X
This viral Twitter story is the perfect reminder that it's never too late to chase a dream
Netflix is testing ads and people are freaking out
Brexit could make it harder for Irish women seeking abortions in UK
Today's Hurdle hints and answers for April 17, 2025
OnePlus 6T might be sold exclusively at T
Waymo data shows humans are terrible drivers compared to AI
Here's to all the TV romances that didn't make it
接受PR>=1、BR>=1,流量相当,内容相关类链接。