Briseida Resende

Pet dog aggression is a research theme of extreme importance since, today more than ever, caretakers have the motivation and interest to better understand and relate to their dogs. However, most of the literature exploring this theme focuses on biased views of breeding, behaviour profiles and aggression itself. That way, many studies regarding incident predictability end in the same pitfall of standardizing aggression by a single factor, like breed, instead of approaching other important factors beyond genetics and learning. In this essay, we propose a new approach to understand aggression in dogs, taking from non-dichotomous and non-urban-western views. Regarding the animal as complex developing systems, that are always shaping and being shaped by its surrounding environment. With said approach, factors such as skull morphology, size, weight, caretaker relationship and culture, should be further incorporated in research for a deeper understanding of dog aggression as a social communicative behaviour.

Studies suggest that dogs exhibit prosocial behaviors toward humans and can rescue their guardians trapped in a box. We investigated whether dogs could communicate with an experimenter to gain access to a crying actor (the crying condition) who was visible but inaccessible, as she remained behind a fence throughout the test, or when she was simply speaking (the neutral condition). This experimenter was positioned to allow access to the actor, and the dog was free to move within the environment. Our findings indicate that dogs alternated their gazes more frequently between the actor and the experimenter, as well as between the actor and the dog’s guardian when the inaccessible actor was crying. Furthermore, the number of gazes at the guardian and the actor, as well as the duration of gazing at the actor, were greater in the crying condition. Dogs also remained closer to the actor during the crying condition. Our results suggest the dog made more communicative signals in the crying condition, bringing to light the possibility that this communication was being used as a tool to exhibit prosocial behaviors toward the actor.

This study aimed to investigate coordinated actions built between Mbya-Guarani and non-indigenous children during free play activities. 21 Mbya-Guarani and 61 non-indigenous children participated in two “Encounters for Play,” a project constructed by the Indigenous Network and Mbya-Guarani communities. We recorded children’s social interactions during the free playtimes, selected the first and last 10 minutes of each encounter: (1) Performed scans every 30s registering children who were playing together; (2) Applied Social Network Analysis to explore children’s association pattern on each encounter; (3) Performed a focal continuous transcription of each child present in the interethnic clusters using an ethogram. Our results show free play was effective in promoting coordinated actions between children up to eight years old, in mixed age clusters. The “Encounters for Play” activities demonstrated the ability to mitigate the avoidance of ethnic groups in children, displaying potential as an educational intervention.

Dogs are good models for studying behaviour and cognition as they have complex social capabilities. In the current study, we observed how human emotional valences (positive, neutral and negative) affected aspects of dogs’ behaviour. We expected that dogs would exhibit more approaching behaviours in the positive condition and more signs of avoidance in the negative one. We analysed videos of 70 adult pet dogs of various breeds taken from an experiment in which one of two actors expressed an emotion and dogs could freely explore the environment for 30 s. Our results show that dogs exhibit differential behaviour when presented with different emotional valences. Two behaviours arose that might be linked to a reciprocal positive emotional state in dogs: tail raised between 90° and 180° and physical contact during sniffing. These behaviours are associated with an active search for information. In the positive conditions, dogs were more willing to explore the social environment and gather information from the actors.

Emotions are critical for humans, not only feeling and expressing them, but also reading the emotional expressions of others. For a long time, this ability was thought to be exclusive to people; however, there is now evidence that other animals also rely on emotion perception to guide their behaviour and to adjust their actions in such way as to guarantee success in their social groups. This is the case for domestic dogs, who have tremendously complex abilities to perceive the emotional expressions not only of their conspecifics but also of human beings. In this paper we discuss dogs’ capacities to read human emotions. More than perception, though, are dogs able to use this emotional information in a functional way? Does reading emotional expressions allow them to live functional social lives? Dogs can respond functionally to emotional expressions and can use the emotional information they obtain from others during problem-solving, that is, acquiring information from faces and body postures allows them to make decisions. Here, we tackle questions related to the abilities of responding to and using emotional information from human expressions in a functional way and discuss how far dogs can go when reading our emotions.

Elucidating the elements involved in the gender development is challenging and transcends the nature/nurture dichotomy. We investigated if gender differences would be more pronounced in older infants (11-18 months) than younger ones (6-11 months); and related to gendered toys (masculine: vehicles, and feminine: dolls, dress-up accessories, and domestic items). We discussed our findings in line with the Dynamic Systems Theory. Mothers filled out an online sociodemographic questionnaire, and the Affordances in the Home Environment for Motor Development – Infant Scale. Gender differences were found just from 12 months on and in three out of the four gendered toys. Girls presented more dolls and dress-up accessories and boys, more vehicles and animal toys. Male gender, number of siblings and older infants predicted higher number of vehicles and animal toys, while only female gender predicted higher number of dolls and dress-up accessories. Socialization influence gender role stereotyping, producing distinct sex-typed toy preferences.

O ensaio discute o conceito de cognição corporeada, de Andy Clark, e sua relação com a questão mente-corpo. Objetiva-se definir o conceito, temáticas com que conversa e como propõe novas alternativas teóricas para a questão, trazendo suas influências teóricas e, então, discutir como o cérebro, a cognição, o corpo e suas relações são localizadas nessa perspectiva. Compara-se o conceito com outras teorias cognitivas; terminando a exposição, discorrendo-se acerca da possibilidade de se incorporar esse enquadre teórico às Ciências Cognitivas, psicologia e psicanálise, discutindo-se, também, os limites e as potencialidades desse conceito para uma concepção renovada de desenvolvimento cognitivo.

The ability to infer emotional states and their wider consequences requires the establishment of relationships between the emotional display and subsequent actions. These abilities, together with the use of emotional information from others in social decision making, are cognitively demanding and require inferential skills that extend beyond the immediate perception of the current behaviour of another individual. They may include predictions of the significance of the emotional states being expressed. These abilities were previously believed to be exclusive to primates. In this study, we presented adult domestic dogs with a social interaction between two unfamiliar people, which could be positive, negative or neutral. After passively witnessing the actors engaging silently with each other and with the environment, dogs were given the opportunity to approach a food resource that varied in accessibility. We found that the available emotional information was more relevant than the motivation of the actors (i.e. giving something or receiving something) in predicting the dogs’ responses. Thus, dogs were able to access implicit information from the actors’ emotional states and appropriately use the affective information to make context-dependent decisions. The findings demonstrate that a non-human animal can actively acquire information from emotional expressions, infer some form of emotional state and use this functionally to make decisions.