Do Dogs Really Feel Guilt or Shame? (Op-Ed)

Marc Bekoff | April 04, 2014 09:08pm ET

Marc Bekoff, emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is one of the world's pioneering cognitive ethologists, a Guggenheim Fellow, and co-founder with Jane Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Bekoff's latest book is Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed (New World Library, 2013). This Op-Ed is adapted from one that appeared in Bekoff's column Animal Emotions in Psychology Today. He contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

We've all seen the look on our dog's face that says, "Uh oh, I did something I shouldn’t have done and I don't think you’re gonna like it." We read it as guilt or shame. 

Recently, a reader sent me an essay by Laura Moss of Mother Nature Network called "Do Dogs Really Feel Guilt?" Moss summarizes the excellent studies conducted by a renowned dog researcher, Barnard College's Alexandra Horowitz. Horowitz discovered that people are not very good at reading doggie guilt or shame — and that we often see those emotions when they're not there, when the dogs aren't feeling them or because they didn't do anything that would elicit these sorts of responses. Horowitz goes deeper into these concepts in her new edited book called Domestic Dog Cognition and Behavior.

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Black bears show counting skills on computers

Black bears have demonstrated counting abilities, in a first for the species.

Three captive bears took a series of number-based tests on a touch-screen computer, research published in the journal Animal Behaviour showed.

They had to choose between two different-sized sets of dots and were rewarded with food for correct answers.

"People don't generally understand them to be as intelligent as they probably are," said Jennifer Vonk, the researcher who led the study.

Although bears have the largest relative brain size of any carnivore, their cognition is not well understood.

Dr Vonk, an assistant professor in psychology at Oakland University said that the North American black bears were first trained to understand the process and equipment involved in the tests.

"This is the first published work with bears working on a touch screen," she said. "It hasn't been done with any large carnivores."

The experiment then involved presenting the bears with two sets of dots or "arrays".

"Basically we were looking to see if they can understand to choose less or choose more," she said.

They touched the screen to select one or other of the arrays, and were given food if they got the answer right.

One bear was rewarded for touching the screen with a greater number dots, and for the other two bears, a correct answer was an array with a fewer number of dots.

Continued:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18447587