When it comes to taking care of a dog, most owners go above and beyond to make sure their pet is happy and healthy. But every now and then, we do something that upsets them - like accidentally stepping on their foot when we're walking around the house.
Thankfully, scientists have discovered how to apologise to our pets in a way they can actually understand - rather than simply telling them we're sorry. A study published in Animal Cognition shares how speaking in a baby voice - otherwise known as 'dog-directed speech (DDS) - can ease your pet's mind after tripping over their paws.
The research team studied 37 pet dogs from volunteers - with some being spoken to in a 'normal voice' while others were spoken to in a 'baby voice'. Measuring the amount of time the dogs were attentive to each volunteer, it was discovered those spoken to in a 'baby voice' stayed attentive for longer.
A researcher wrote: "Overall, the results of this study suggest that naturalistic DDS, comprising of both dog-directed [speech patterns] and dog-relevant content words, improves dogs' attention and may strengthen the affiliative bond between humans and their pets."
Alongside apologising to your pet in a soft voice, you should check their paw for any injuries and ice them for 10 minutes if you spot redness or swelling.
Another study, published in The Royal Society, claims dogs have the ability to understand human intentions based on their emotional response.
This means they understand it was an accident - and you wasn't trying to hurt them intentionally.
"The perception of emotional expressions allows animals to evaluate the social intentions and motivations of each other," the study reads.
"This usually takes place within species; however, in the case of domestic dogs, it might be advantageous to recognise the emotions of humans as well as other dogs.
"In this sense, the combination of visual and auditory cues to categorise others' emotions facilitates the information processing and indicates high-level cognitive representations.
"Using a cross-modal preferential looking paradigm, we presented dogs with either human or dog faces with different emotional valences (happy/playful versus angry/aggressive) paired with a single vocalisation from the same individual with either a positive or negative valence or Brownian noise.
"Dogs looked significantly longer at the face whose expression was congruent to the valence of vocalisation, for both conspecifics and heterospecifics, an ability previously known only in humans.
"These results demonstrate that dogs can extract and integrate bimodal sensory emotional information, and discriminate between positive and negative emotions from both humans and dogs."
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