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Research: Dogs Wag Their Tails To Make Us Happy

It’s amazing you can form such a strong bond with an animal who communicates with you exclusively non-verbally.

If you’re a dog owner, you know the joy of walking in through the door to be greeted by your pup excitedly wagging their tail.

But did you know that dogs are one of the few animals that use their tails primarily for communication?

Despite this fact, scientists still don’t understand exactly why dogs wag their tails. In a new paper published in the journal Biology Letters, researchers outline a few theories.

Most people equate tail wagging with a happy dog, but reality may be more complicated.

Take a look at more research out of the Canine Cognition Center here

There are many possible hypothesis for why dogs wag their tails and a couple of them are listed below.

1. Domestication Syndrome Hypothesis

This hypothesis relates to the human domestication of dogs, which began as early as 35,000 years ago.

Perhaps tail-wagging was a behavior that humans unintentionally selected for, because it was linked with other preferable traits, like tameness or friendliness toward people.

Tail-wagging may have simply been a byproduct of other specifically targeted characteristics.

2. Domesticated Rhythmic Wagging

This hypothesis suggests that humans consciously or unconsciously selected for tail-wagging during domestication, because they are drawn to rhythmic stimuli.

Tail Wagging 101

The new paper adds to the big-picture understanding of what scientists do and don’t know about tail-wagging.

The authors reviewed more than 100 studies about the behavior and summarized their findings: humans likely altered dogs’ tail wagging without realizing it.

According to the Washington Post, “the findings could flip the long-held belief that dogs are wagging their tails because they’re happy. Instead, Hersh and her colleagues suggest that dog tail-wags made people happy, so humans tended to select for that trait when welcoming dog ancestors into their lives and breeding the animal.”

Messages Conveyed by Tail-Wagging

Dogs also seem to wag their tails in different ways to convey different messages.

  • Wagging more to the right means a dog is curious and wants to approach
  • Wagging to the left is correlated with uncertainty
  • Low tail wagging—where dogs pin their tails down against their back legs—is also linked with insecurity and submission

Interestingly, a study found that dogs began wagging their tails more than wolves when they were as young as three weeks old. And another study found that dogs wag their tails faster and more often than other canines.

Domestication of Dogs

Scientists have found that dozens of dogs’ traits and behaviors changed during domestication, including the appearance of their fur, ears, body size — and even their ability to make “puppy-dog eyes.”

In fact, eyebrows give dogs a wider range of human-like facial expressions we can identify with and they play a vital role in how dogs became “man’s best friend.”

Evolutionary psychologists even believe that centuries of domestication “transformed the facial muscle anatomy of dogs specifically for facial communication with humans”.

The post Research: Dogs Wag Their Tails To Make Us Happy first appeared on Humintell.

Feeling angry? Write down your thoughts then throw them away

There are many ways to manage your emotions and researchers out of Nagoya Univeristy have discovered a simple, but effective, strategy to help with anger management.

Writing down your thoughts on the cause of your anger and then throwing that piece of paper away can be an effective way to neutralize your negative feelings.

The study entitled “After being insulted, writing down your feelings on paper then getting rid of it reduces anger” was published in Scientific Reports on Nature.

This important research builds on similar research on the association between the written word and anger reduction as well as studies showing how interactions with physical objects can control a person’s mood.

For example, after a bad breakup you may feel the desire to burn letters or destroy gifts from your ex.

Anger Study Methodology

For their anger project, lead researcher Nobuyuki Kawai and his graduate student Yuta Kanaya asked 50 participants to write brief opinions about important social problems, such as whether smoking in public should be outlawed.

Evaluators then deliberately scored the papers low on intelligence, interest, friendliness, logic, and rationality.

For good measure, evaluators added insulting comments such as: “I cannot believe an educated person would think like this. I hope this person learns something while at the university.”

After handing out these negative comments, the researchers asked the participants to write their thoughts on the feedback, focusing on what triggered their emotions.

One group was told to either roll up the paper with their thoughts and throw it in a bin or keep it in a file on their desk. A second group was told to shred the paper, or put it in a plastic box.

The students were then asked to rate their anger after the insult and after either disposing of or keeping the paper.

Anger Study Results

As expected, all participants reported a higher level of anger after receiving insulting comments.

However, the anger levels of the individuals who discarded their paper in the trash can or shredded it returned to their initial state after disposing of the paper.

Meanwhile, the participants who held on to a hard copy of the insult experienced only a small decrease in their overall anger.

Researchers concluded that “the meaning (interpretation) of disposal plays a critical role” in reducing anger.

The Japanese Tradition Hakidashira

This process is like a Japanese tradition called hakidashisara, in which people write their negative thoughts on a plate then destroy it.

Along with its practical benefits, this discovery may shed light on the origins of the Japanese cultural tradition known as hakidashisara (hakidashi sara refers to a dish or plate) at the Hiyoshi shrine in Kiyosu, just outside Nagoya.

Hakidashisara is an annual festival where people smash small discs representing things that make them angry.

The study’s findings may explain the feeling of relief that participants report after leaving the festival, the paper concluded.

Kawai imagines using his research to help businesspeople who find themselves in stressful situations.

“This technique could be applied in the moment by writing down the source of anger as if taking a memo and then throwing it away when one feels angry in a business situation,” he explained.

For another helpful guide to anger, read this past blog post from Humintell.

The post Feeling angry? Write down your thoughts then throw them away first appeared on Humintell.

Digital Devices Can Hinder Kids’ Emotion Regulation Ability

All parents of young children know how challenging it is when your child throws a tantrum. But think again before you reach for a mobile phone or tablet to soothe them.

New research entitled “Cure for tantrums? Longitudinal associations between parental digital emotion regulation and children’s self-regulatory skills” suggests that doing so may damage a child’s ability to manage their emotions later in life, otherwise known as emotion regulation.

This lack of emotion regulation skills could subsequently lead to anger management issues when the child is an adult.

Children’s Development

Children learn a lot about self-regulation – affective, mental, and behavioral responses to certain situations – during their first few years of life, and researchers say this is mainly done through their relationship with their parents.

In fact, young brains need a lot of external stimuli to develop particularly from birth to age 3. It’s during this time that children’s neurons are making connections for fundamental skills such as vision, hearing, and language.

When children spent too much time in front of a screen rather than interacting with people, they can have stunted development of the frontal lobe part. This is the part of the brain that decodes social interactions.

As a result, it can be more difficult to develop empathy or learn social cues such as facial expressions.

Tantrums and Digital Devices

In recent years, it has become more common to give children digital devices to control their responses to emotions, especially if they are negative.

But study researchers suggest that if people knew digital devices were not appropriate for dealing with tantrums, the mental health and wellbeing of children would benefit.

Dr Veronika Konok, the study’s first author and a researcher at Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary, says:

“Tantrums cannot be cured by digital devices. Children have to learn how to manage their negative emotions for themselves. They need the help of their parents during this learning process, not the help of a digital device. Here we show that if parents regularly offer a digital device to their child to calm them or to stop a tantrum, the child won’t learn to regulate their emotions. This leads to more severe emotion-regulation problems, specifically, anger management problems, later in life.”

Long Term Digital Consequences

Prof Caroline Fitzpatrick, senior author of the study explains that many parents frequently use tablets or smart phones to divert their child’s attention when they are upset.

Children are fascinated by digital content, so this is an easy way to stop tantrums. It may be effective in the short term but researchers suspect that over the long term this strategy could have drastic consequences.

In 2020, researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke conducted an assessment and a followed-up one year later.

More than 300 parents of children aged between two- and five-years-old completed a questionnaire which assessed child and parent media use.

According to the findings, when parents used digital emotion regulation more often, children showed poorer anger and frustration management skills a year later.

Children who were given devices more often as they experienced negative emotions also showed less ability to choose a deliberate response over an automatic one.

The study, published in Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, also found that poorer anger management skills at the beginning meant children were given digital devices more often as a management tool.

Alternate Solutions for Parents

So if giving a child throwing a tantrum a screen is not a good option, what may be a better alternative?

It is important not to avoid situations that could be frustrating to the child, the researchers pointed out. Instead, it is recommended that parents coach their children through difficult situations, help them recognize their emotions, and teach them to handle them.

To equip parents of children with anger management problems for success, it is important that they receive support, the researchers said.

For example, health professionals working with families could provide information on how parents can help their children manage their emotions without giving them tablets or smartphones.

The post Digital Devices Can Hinder Kids’ Emotion Regulation Ability first appeared on Humintell.