Rivera ’21, Meyers-Manor publish continued research on dog empathy

Micael Rivera ’21 and Associate Professor of Psychology Julia Meyers-Manor had their research titled “Beware of Strangers: Dogs’ Empathetic Response to Unknown Humans” published in a special issue of Animals called “Emotional Contagion in Animals.”

Meyers-Manor’s research on empathy in dogs began in 2016, an exploration ignited by her very own dog and how it responded to her distress. She continues to study dog empathy and behavior today, developing new approaches to research the same questions.

A number of her experiments have been conducted with the support of Ripon College students. In the present study, Rivera acted as a stranger to the dogs and either was calm or cried out in distress while both physiological and behavioral stress indicators were measured in the dogs.

In the experiment, dogs were given the choice to push open a door to reach a human, a method similar to a prior study on how dogs rescue their owners in distress conducted by Meyers-Manor. However, unlike the previous interactions with their owners, the dogs did not open the door more quickly or more frequently for the distressed stranger compared to the calm one. Additionally, the dogs showed no variation in their physiological or behavioral responses to either the calm or distressed human.

“This research expands our previous knowledge about empathetic responses to owners by helping us understand whether dogs have similar responses to strangers,” Meyers-Manor said.

Rivera said this research helped further explain the relationships between dogs and humans.

“Research such as this one is great to gain insight into how, if, and in what contexts dogs can exhibit empathy and emotional contagion, allowing us to quantify and detangle the complex relationships that dogs have with humans,” Rivera said.

Rivera spent several years working on this study with Meyers-Manor and used it as his senior seminar project.

“It was great working with Mica in designing and completing this study,” Meyers-Manor said. “We had a great time testing all of the dogs.”

Rivera said having the research published is a great conclusion to years of hard work.

“Having a publication always feels so exciting,” Rivera said. “After all your hard work, the scientific community welcomes what you have to say. This publication was especially exciting to have published as it was something Julia and I had worked so long on. She was the one who introduced me to research, so to have a paper with both of our names on it was extra special.”

Meyers-Manor said undergraduate student research and publications are two things that make Ripon College such a great place.

“I love working closely with students and teaching them the entire research process,” Meyers-Manor said. “With publication, students get to see how the work we do together has impacts in the real world.”

Meyers-Manor said her lab is now testing how different measures of empathy correlate in dogs.

Rivera currently works for the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program as a marine mammal assistant 1, and in a few months, he will be starting his Ph.D. in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

At Ripon, Rivera majored in psychobiology, and he was one of the first two students in Meyers-Manor’s lab at Ripon.