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. 2014 Jul 23;9(7):e94597.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0094597. eCollection 2014.

Jealousy in dogs

Christine R Harris  1 , Caroline Prouvost  1
Affiliations

Jealousy in dogs

Christine R Harris et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that jealousy is unique to humans, partially because of the complex cognitions often involved in this emotion. However, from a functional perspective, one might expect that an emotion that evolved to protect social bonds from interlopers might exist in other social species, particularly one as cognitively sophisticated as the dog. The current experiment adapted a paradigm from human infant studies to examine jealousy in domestic dogs. We found that dogs exhibited significantly more jealous behaviors (e.g., snapping, getting between the owner and object, pushing/touching the object/owner) when their owners displayed affectionate behaviors towards what appeared to be another dog as compared to nonsocial objects. These results lend support to the hypothesis that jealousy has some "primordial" form that exists in human infants and in at least one other social species besides humans.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Comparisons of the proportion of dogs exhibiting each type of behavior in each of the three experimental conditions.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Proportion of time dogs spent attending to and orienting away from their owner and the object in each of the three experimental conditions.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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