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Dogs can smell mental stress in humans with 94 percent accuracy

2022-10-01T04:12:32.518Z


Dogs can smell mental stress in humans with 94 percent accuracy Created: 10/01/2022, 06:00 By: Jasmine Farah A new study shows something amazing: Thanks to their unique olfactory organ, dogs can smell when we feel stressed. It's our breath. Dogs have a unique sense of smell that is vastly superior to ours. That's because they have 125 to 220 million olfactory cells, depending on the breed, whi


Dogs can smell mental stress in humans with 94 percent accuracy

Created: 10/01/2022, 06:00

By: Jasmine Farah

A new study shows something amazing: Thanks to their unique olfactory organ, dogs can smell when we feel stressed.

It's our breath.

Dogs have a unique sense of smell that is vastly superior to ours.

That's because they have 125 to 220 million olfactory cells, depending on the breed, while we have just 5 million.

But not only that: They can also distinguish between smells much better than we can.

An advantage that humans have been using since the domestication of the wolf thousands of years ago.

Dogs can smell mental stress in humans with 94 percent accuracy

A well-known example is sniffer dogs.

They are trained by the police to be able to smell drugs and sound the alarm, and they are used at customs, for example.

On the other hand, it has also been established in medicine that dogs can recognize when their owner is unwell or is seriously ill, for example with cancer.

Dogs can smell it when we're emotionally down, study says.

(Iconic image) © Aris Litso/Imago

However, according to a new study, this is not only limited to physical problems, but also applies to psychological ones.

According to this, British researchers from Queen's University Belfast and Newcastle University found out that the four-legged friends can smell when we are emotionally bad.

If we feel stressed, it is not uncommon for the furry friends to "feel" it and try to cheer up their owner with cuddles. 

Dogs can smell mental stress in humans, study finds

In their study, published in the journal

PLOS ONE

, the researchers subjected 20 dogs aged between 11 and 36 months to an olfactory test.

According to study leader Clara Wilson, the four-legged friends, who belonged to different races, including two mixed breeds, trained their sense of smell for an hour a week for ten months.

According to the researchers, special attention was paid to ensuring that the furry friends learn to distinguish between two specific and very similar individual human odors: from sweat and breath.

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To do this, the dogs gradually received various odor samples from 53 healthy subjects.

They were previously subjected to a cognitive performance test, during which they were also put under pressure by the researchers.

In addition, a breath test was carried out before and after, and their necks were wiped with a piece of gauze.

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Dogs can smell psychological stress in humans - thanks to a unique olfactory organ

Finally, the test persons had to fill out a questionnaire before the test and shortly afterwards, in the latter they were asked to indicate how stressed they felt in the exam situation.

If the study participants showed a correspondingly high stress reaction and if their blood pressure and heartbeat also increased, their samples were given to the four-legged friends along with two blank samples.

With an amazing result: The dogs were able to filter out the “stress sample” with an accuracy of up to 94 percent.

Study director Wilson also has a very simple explanation for this: After all, it has been shown that when people feel stress, their bodily functions change, they sweat or breathe more heavily.

This affects our smell and dogs are able to recognize this change.

Source: merkur

All life articles on 2022-10-01

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