Dogs Can Smell When You’re Feeling Stressed, Heartwarming Study Shows

There’s no shortage of examples as to why the old adage “dogs are a man’s best friend” rings true.

From being great cuddle buddies to accompanying you on walks and being the best fetch partners, here’s one more to add to the list: being able to smell when you’re stressed. 

According to a recent study, our furry friends can sniff out the difference in human odors when someone’s feeling calm or stressed out. So the next time you come back from a long, arduous day at work and Fido offers you a paw—it probably knows. 

CNN points out that earlier research had already proven that canines may be able to detect feelings of happiness and fear through smell, though the latest study only focuses on human subjects’ stress levels, therefore eliminating other scents for greater accuracy. 

How does one get a dog to smell stress? To get this experiment started, researchers collected a control set of breath and sweat samples from 36 participants, before subjecting them to the challenging math task of counting backward from 9,000 in units of 17. 

Once the subjects completed the task, another round of bodily samples was collected, along with heart rate and blood pressure measurements.

As per NBC News, the pooches were trained to identify samples from persons who were stressed, honing their abilities by practicing on three choices in the form of an unused piece of gauze, a sample from an unstressed person, and another sample after the same person felt stressed. 

Impressively, the dogs displayed a 90% to 96.88% accuracy at determining stress samples, performing even better than the researchers had anticipated. 

However, we’ll probably never know if our pets equate the distinct smell with the actual idea of stress, or if it’s just a different scent they pick up without meaning. 

Of course, the next time you’re close to tearing your hair out, it’s better to believe your fluffy companion can sense your frustration through its nose, and wants to offer you comfort. 

[via CNN and NBC News, cover image via Dmitry Marchenko | Dreamstime.com]