Listening to Angry Human Voices Could Throw Off a Dog's Balance

Dogs can be very responsive to human voices, to the point that the sound of our voices may affect their stability. Like humans, animals can rely on visual cues to support balance, posture, and stabilization, but recent human studies have shown that sound can also affect stability. Researchers from the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, wanted to see whether sound had the same impact on dogs as it did on humans.

Presenting their findings in the journal PLOS One, the research team examined how the sound of angry and happy human voices impacted a dog’s stability.

“We believe that these findings provide new insights into the interplay between auditory stimuli, emotional processing, and postural control in dogs, contributing to a growing understanding of sensory-emotional integration in non-human species,” the authors said in the study.

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Tracking Dog Balance and Reactions

For this prospective study, Nadja Affenzeller and the research team at the University of Veterinary Medicine surveyed 23 pet dogs as they listened to recordings of angry and happy human voices — two male and two female. The breeds ranged from border collies to Labradors to golden retrievers to mixed breeds, among others.

The team had each dog stand on a Zebris platform — a pressure-sensing platform — equipped with 15,360 sensors that can detect even slight movements. In front of the dogs on the platform, a TV monitor played the voice recordings through the TV’s speakers.

Once on the platform, the researchers played the voice recordings and analyzed the dog’s movements, comparing them to the 5 balance-related parameters: mediolateral displacement, craniocaudal displacement, support surface, average speed, and statokinesigram length.

Dogs Listening to Human Voices

Compared to silence, the results showed that when a dog heard an angry human voice, there were higher values around the support surface parameter — the area on the platform associated with the dog’s center of pressure. This indicates destabilization, and the dogs needed to move more to stay balanced.

While one may infer that if a dog hears angry human voices and becomes destabilized, then listening to happy voices will have the opposite effect. This was not the case in this study.

When the dogs were presented with happy voices, 57 percent showed destabilization, while only 43 percent showed stabilization, or “freezing.” The team also noted that the most severe destabilization, observed in 30 percent of the dogs, was associated with the angry voice, whereas the other 70 percent showed no change in their stabilization.

“These exploratory findings suggest that the emotional arousal triggered by human voices can have both stabilizing and destabilizing effects on canine balance. Angry human voices were associated with the greatest destabilizing effect,” the study authors wrote.

Understanding How Dogs Precieve Our Voices

The study suggests that both happy and angry human voices can elicit emotional arousal, potentially destabilizing balance. According to the researchers, more information is needed to understand how impactful our voices can be to dogs. The team aims to examine a dog’s prior experiences with humans and whether freezing to happy voices may be an anticipatory judgement.

“Increased stability in some dogs when hearing happy voices were attributed to anticipatory adjustments (rather than freezing in response to a threat). However, these findings should be interpreted with caution, given the exploratory design and the study’s methodological limitations,” the authors wrote.

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Article Sources

Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:

• This article references information from a study published in PLOS One: Effects of happy and angry human voice recordings on postural stability in dogs: An exploratory biomechanical analysis