According to a study, dogs are women’s best friends.
Namely, a recent study concluded that dogs tend to listen to women more than they listen to men.
Women appear to be better in the communication with dogs and are more likely to understand what their furry besties are trying to tell them when they’re growling and barking.
According to the study, women are better in this communication because of their higher levels of empathy.
Continue reading to learn more about the findings of the study…
How Was the Study Conducted?
The study was published in the journal Royal Society of Open Science and it concluded that women are more ‘fluent’ in ‘dog language’ than men are and thus, they have a better understanding of dogs’ wants and needs.
It was done by a group of animal behavioral scientists from Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary.
For the purposes of the study, they taped the sounds of 18 dogs growling in various situations.
Some of these situations were guarding food, feeling threatened by a stranger, and playing tug of war.
They also asked 40 individuals to try and decipher what these growls meant and to which situation they belong.
The women participants had better scores than the men.
Why Dogs Listen to Women more than They Listen to Men?
One of the lead researchers Tamas Farago said that the study suggests that dogs and humans use similar parts of the brain and probably similar processes to assess others’ feelings on the basis of their vocalization.
The researchers further explained that there are some biologically-rooted rules to how the mammalian vocalization encodes feelings.
These shared processes help us assess the emotions of dogs and other mammal species’ expressions of emotions through vocalization.
They also noted that women tend to be more emphatic and sensitive to others’ feelings and this may be what helps them be better at associating context with the emotional content of the dog’s growling.
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