Like most gyms in New York City, if not everywhere, the New York Sports Club at Wall Street has the machines packed in pretty tight.

Whenever we finish a set on one of my least favorite machines, a kind of leaning-forward-seated-row-this-can’t-be-right monstrosity, my trainer says “Watch your head,” since it would be pretty easy to clock yourself on a plate getting out from behind. After about the fifth time I started to think “I know already!” to myself.

Today was the first day back after 2 weeks off due to vacation. It’s a Monday and I am fried. Just back from a week away, three new classes started over the weekend, up late last night catching up on paperwork…I wasn’t ready for a workout this morning. But that’s when you need to go most.

We finished a set on the monstrosity, and I just sat there. Frozen. Unable to move. Vapor locked. Finally Joseph said “Watch your head!” Then I got up.

Whoa. What happened there?

I got stuck. For whatever reason I froze until Joseph’s prompt spurred me into action and reminded me of what I needed to do next.

A prompt is " is a cue or assistance to encourage the desired response from an individual." (Wikipedia definition, good enough for this discussion.)

If you taken a basic obedience class or worked with a trainer, chances are you’ve dealt with prompts. usually they’re something we want to get rid of. When we train down, bending over to touch the ground is a prompt that many people fail to get rid of.

Dogs are very conscious of our body language, often (if not always) more so that our spoken language. A great deal of research has shown us that dogs are not just aware of how we move, but are unusually adept at reading it. And of course there’s the story of Clever Hans where a handler who was not aware of his own prompts made fools out of a lot of people.

If we are not careful, we can inadvertently train a prompt we don’t want. Bending over to get a down is an obvious one. But dipping your head to get a sit, or needed to drop a shoulder to get your dog to go through a tunnel in agility can be more difficult to see when your are troubleshooting a training problem.

Are prompts always bad? Not at all.

Sometimes you do need that assistance to get a behavior. What’s important is to be aware of how your body language and other signals are effecting your dog’s behavior and then use that awareness to get what you want, when you want it.

Have you even had to figure out an unintentional prompt? Have you ever used one deliberately?

In addition to learning how dogs learn, I had to learn how to communicate with them too. Communication with dogs involves more “body language” than anything else, and in this area men have a distinct disadvantage — especially in regards to fearful and/or aggressive dogs.

When two dogs make an initial greeting the first few seconds (at least) tend to be quiet, slow, deliberate, and circular. This sort of body language comes more naturally to women than to men. I had to “learn” how to move than way, and then make it as automatic as I could.

So, think about how most children move for a moment.

The words quiet, slow, deliberate, and circular, probably did not come to mind, did they? More like noisy, fast, and unpredictable. (I love children by the way, this is about how things are and has nothing to do with my feelings about kids.) For a fearful or under-socialized dog children can be downright scary and it doesn’t take long to establish an association between the appearance of children and a threatening situation.

This can alleviated, and sometimes even completely changed, with behavior modification. The association needs to be changed, and it may be possible to desensitize your dog to the way children move and behave.

Similar to the way we deal with on leash aggression, dogs can be systematically desensitized to the approach and presence of children by pairing them with something positive, like food. It obviously requires a lot of care and planning, as we never want to put children at risk of injury or even ending up afraid of dog themselves.

It’s tough having a dog that is afraid of children. We want our dogs to be a part of the family, and family often involves kids. There is hope though, and there is no reason to just live with or manage the problem.

Have you had experience with your dog being afraid of children or other family members?

I’ve always loved comic strips. I even blog about them sporadically over at Daily Comics Review with a few other fans and artists. Of course comics strip often involve dogs and training, but sometimes the most appropriate training comics don’t even have dogs in them.

The strip above demonstrates classical conditioning: Janis associates baby powder with playing with her baby, while Arlo associates it with a distastful chore.

This is exactly how classical conditioning works, a stimulus — in this case an odor — evokes a emotional memory. This is powerful stuff! The physical mechanisms that classical conditioning utilize are different from other kinds of learning. The associations are very durable – they take a long time to be forgotten, if ever. The associations also seem to involve parts of the brain involved with emotion, although this is still under study. But we have all experienced a smell or a small snippet of music that years later can bring back a strong emotional response.

As a matter of fact, behavior people often refer to a conditioned emotional response (CER.) Not just because "pavlovian response" has fewer syllables and doesn’t sound as cool, but because that is exactly what is happening. Janis is happy – she is thinking of a beautiful, special, and intimate time with her son. (He’s in his 20s now, and almost done with college.) Arlo is disgusted, thinking of dirty diapers.

While which areas of the brain are involved may still be unresolved, we do know that conditioned emotional responses are not strengthened or weakened that way “operant” behaviors are: they can not be reinforced or punished. Comforting someone when they are afraid doesn’t make them more afraid. Punching someone for being angry doesn’t make them less angry.

Conditioned emotional responses can go extinct, in other words, the association can be lost. But this takes time — how long really depends on the individual and the situation — and usually requires that the situation be avoided completely for a long time. It’s also possible for the association to spontaneously recover – come back even after it appeared to be extinct. Pavlov encountered this back with his famous dogs, when he did the first intense research into this kind of learning.

Rather than attempting extinction, we usually work to change the association. Pair the stimulus that triggers the response, starting with low intensity and gradually increasing it, with something pleasant.

So in Arlo’s case, we could pair increasingly large concentrations of baby powder with mugs of beer, until he started to associate the baby powder with something more pleasant than dirty diapers.

What do you think? What good and bad associations do you have?

What did you say?

I’m assuming this is why you are here. Your goal isn’t to master the four quadrants of operant conditioning and become a professional dog trainer. You want help dealing with one or more behavioral problems. You would love to learn how to really communicate your dog so that you can easily solve or completely avoid similar problems in the future. It turns out that the way to accomplish sounds a lot like the way you might accomplish it with your friends, your spouse, or your coworkers.

The first step is to figure out what your dog is saying to you. In the human relations world we talk about active listening — understanding, interpreting, and evaluating, what you hear. With dogs we tend to make our communications “one-way”, since they cannot speak to us. Fix that. I spend a lot of time teaching my clients and students dog body language, and just learning that fixes a lot of their problems.

The second step is to figure out what your dog wants. You need to encourage the behavior you want by rewarding it and discourage the behavior you do not want by not rewarding it. What’s the common thread here? The reward — what your dog wants. Identify those things and then provide your dog with them at the right time.

As soon as you identify what she is saying and what she wants, you can start to hold a conversation. Does she want your attention? (Safe bet.) When does she get it? When she barks repeatedly and you shout in response? Or is it when she sits politely at your feet and you acknowledge her with some attention and affection? If you implicitly punish her demand barking by ignoring her or giving her a time-out, do you make a point of picking up on her attempt to get attention by being polite?

This is the big picture: the answer to truly communicating with your dog is by understanding her first.

Listen first and then respond in terms of what your “significant other” wants.

What do you think? Does this sound like advice you might get for other relationships? Does it sound like something you have heard about your relationship with your dog before?

Time-outs, when used correctly, are an effective way to deal with unwanted behavior. But when you wish to use one there are a few rules you should keep in mind.

Let’s be clear: time-outs are a form of punishment and punishment is something that needs to be used carefully or it becomes something else entirely, such as abuse, harassment, or nagging.

A time-out is social isolation. We are attempting to punish that is, decrease the frequency of a behavior by taking a dog away from one area and moving her to another. This is negative punishment. We are taking something away — access to other dogs, people, and/or toys.

This can be very effective for attention-seeking behaviors, such as biting, nipping, jumping up and barking. It is also effective for rowdy play. Follow these five rules, and you can be sure that your time-outs will work without any unwanted side effects.

Time-outs must be immediate

In order for a punishment to work it must be connected to the infraction. If you wait too long, how can the dog know what she did wrong? When you see the behavior you do not want, immediately remove her to a quiet spot.

Time-outs must be brief

Likewise, in order for the dog to realize she has been placed in a time-out, she needs to regain access to whatever was taken away quickly: very quickly, as in less than 3 minutes or so. If you wait too long she can forget what happened and it simple becomes a change in scenery.

Time-outs must be infrequent

As defined above, a punishment decreases the frequency of a behavior. If the behavior does not decrease it’s not working! Don’t keeping putting a dog in time-out and look for the behavior to change. It’s time to change your tactics.

Time-outs must mean isolation

Taking a dog from a playgroup and putting her in a crate full of toys is not effective. It’s simply the end of play. A time-out must mean isolation from fun stuff. Since we have already established that it must be brief, this is not too punitive. (Note: if the dog “throws a fit” such as barking, don’t release her or she will learn that barking works!)

Time-outs must be emotionless

Don’t raise your voice or reprimand your dog. Simply say something like “uh-oh!” and calmly place her in the quiet and isolated area. Time-outs are not scary or punitive. (As a matter of fact, nothing should be scary or punitive!) Send a simple message: when you do X you lose access to Y. Nothing more, nothing less. If you follow this rule, you can use your crate for this, since you will not create any additional negative associations.

Follow these simple rules and you have a safe, humane and effective tool for creating the behavior you want.

Photo credit: drothamel

Lots of exciting things going on with Dog Spelled Forward right now. Dog training classes at a new location and a bunch of new dog training classes added to the schedule in Maywood. It’s a busy time of year and the blogging tends to suffer a little.

But this week I have a special treat: a podcast interview with Kelly and Ian Dunbar! We spoke a few weeks ago for the IAABC podcast, and the brief discussion about Ian Dunbar’s ideas and concerns regarding the state of dog training and how they relate to Kelly’s fantastic Open Paw program for shelters was pretty darn good, if I say so myself.

Check it out:

Click to hear Kelly and Ian Dunbar

Have a great holiday! I’ll be back in 2 weeks.

This is a guest post from Lisa Shoreland, currently a resident blogger at Go College, where recently she’s been researching Perkins loans versus private student loan programs. In her spare time, she enjoys creative writing, practicing martial arts, and taking weekend trips.

I’ll be back next week – have a great Easter!

Anyone who’s shut the door to go to work and listened to their dog whine and howl knows that dogs have feelings. (Anyone who’s come back to a house torn apart seemingly from the floorboards up with their tail-wagging dog in the center of it all knows this, too). Still, this is hardly evidence that will stand up to a laboratory or the proverbial courtroom, and the matter of whether animals have feelings or not has been a matter of hot debate for a long time.

Animal lovers and scientists alike have suggested that dogs have feelings but the animals of course cannot speak for themselves. Skeptics of the theory claim that what dogs and other animals feel cannot be classified as emotions and are more like innate responses, such as fleeing from predators or instinctual attachment to their mothers.

Feelings as Natural Instinct

Jaak Panksepp, professor and researcher at Washington State University and recently featured on MSNBC and Psychology today, says that some feelings can be instinctual but they are feelings nonetheless.¹ “People don’t have a monopoly on emotion; rather, despair, joy and love are ancient, elemental responses that have helped all sorts of creatures survive and thrive in the natural world.”

Since bringing in the study of “affective neuroscience” to WSU, Panksepp has emboldened research on people’s and animals’ creation and control of moods, feelings, and attitudes. He claims that although animals may not analyze emotions as intricately as humans can, they certainly do experience them. “All animals have instinctual behaviors, so therefore we target the instinctual circuits. We can stimulate a circuit—say by gently tickling a rat—to essentially ask the animal if he likes the circuit on or off,” he says, adding. “Rats like it on.”

Emotions in Social Animals

Co-director of Liverpool John Moores University, Dr. Filippo Aureli, presented his research on animal and human emotions at 2005’s BA Festival of Science in Dublin.² “Emotion is a valid topic for scientific investigation in animals and helps us to understand how animals behave with great flexibility,” he declared. “For example self-directed behaviors, such as scratch-grooming, obviously have a hygiene function, but they also reflect motivational ambivalence or frustration.” He cited research that showed an increase of such behavior in situations of uncertainty, social tension, or impending danger—like another social creature, humans, biting their fingernails.

It is, in fact, their social instinct that may account for much of the emotions we see in dogs. For example, canines dislike their owners showing affection to another animal (humans included) and especially other dogs. Dogs may also react negatively to the introduction of new partners and pets within a household according to research cited by The Telegraph.³ Jealousy is a secondary emotion (along with embarrassment, empathy, or guilt), and more complex than instant reactions like anger, lust, and joy. “Dogs show a strong aversion to inequity,” Dr. Friederike Range of the University of Vienna’s neurobiology department said. The study included cows, horses, cats, and sheep in addition to dogs, all of which showed more self-awareness than psychologists of another decade would have credited.

Learned Helplessness in Canines

There is still a darker side to animal and human emotions, as exemplified in the experiments conducted by American psychologist Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967.^4,5 Seligman—already deeply involved in the study of depression—paired with Steve Maier to experiment with three grops of domesticated dogs that were harnessed for varying degrees of time:

• Group 1 were harnessed and later released.
• Group 2 dogs were yoked in pairs with dogs of Group 3 and subjected to electric shocks. The dogs in Group 2 ended the pain by pressing a lever.
• Group 3 dogs were yoked in pairs with dogs of Group 2 and subjected to electric shocks. Because the dogs of Group 2 were ending the shocks, the pain was produced and ended to the dogs of Group 3 at seeming random. The pain was inescapable.

Seligman and Maier found that dogs of Group 1 and 2 recovered from the trauma quickly, but dogs of Group 3 exhibited symptoms similar to chronic clinical depression. Their experiment didn’t end there: the three groups of dogs were subjected to electric shocks yet again, which they could escape by jumping over a low gate. Groups 1 and 2 jumped easily. Dogs of Group 3, who had previously learned that their actions begot them nothing, simply lay down and whined.

Optimism in Canines

Seligman’s and Mair’s experiments, while cruel from today’s perspective, showed that dogs do experience depression. One in three dogs subjected to pain at seeming random, however, did not become helpless and found some way to overcome their past experiences with pain. In humans, we call this optimism, the view that situations are not always personal, pervasive, or permanent.
The emotions we have discussed here—optimism, jealousy, joy, frustration, anxiety—while perhaps not felt to the same extent by other animals as by humans, are nevertheless feelings by definition and extant throughout nature. The belief that humans exclusively feel is a selfish and ego-motivated theory that fails to take into account not only scientific research but the wonders of nature themselves, not entirely separate from sentiment. Research will likely continue to unravel the mysteries of animal and especially canine emotions in the future.

Sources:

¹Strenge, Robert. “Animal Emotions Provide Clues to Autism, Other Disorders.” Current Research, Health and Life Science. Washington State University. 2011.

²“Research shows that animals and humans experience the same emotions.” Liverpool John Moores University. September 2005.

³Jamieson, Alastair. “Dogs can be jealous, say scientists.” Dec. 7 2008. The Telegraph.

⁴Seligman, M.E.P. (1975). Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.

⁵Seligman, M.E.P. and Maier, S.F. (1967). Failure to escape traumatic shock. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74, 1–9.

You’ve probably heard about the various studies on dogs and their ability to read our body language. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ve read about it many times, since it is one of my favorite topics.

Last week I had the privilege on interviewing one of the foremost authorities on the topic: Brian Hare, the director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center. Brian did the famous “pointing study” with dogs and also performed the same research with Belyaev’s foxes in Siberia.

Check out the interview and leave a comment!

As always, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

I spend a lot of time writing about how wonderfully dogs have adapted to dealing with us. It’s easy to forget how remarkably well dogs deal with each other.

Over the past decade or so the model of canine behavior in groups has moved toward focusing on individual pair relationships, rather than the rigid hierarchy that was used to describe both dog and wolf relationships. (That article is a great roll-up of many other articles on wolf and dog behavior. It’s a lot more useful than the abstract implies.) This model places a lot of importance on dogs’ abilities to interact on a one-to-one basis.

Earlier this week I wrote about how humans frequently misinterpret dog barks. It’s no surprise that dogs do not suffer from this problem, but what may be surprising is just how good they are at it. When a dog hears a growl, it’s possible that they have a mental representation matching the growl they heard.

Researchers recorded dogs growling as they were guarding a valuable resource. Then they presented the recorded sound to test subjects with 2 images: one of the actual dog and another manipulated to make the dog look larger or smaller. The dogs tended to look first and longest at the correct image. They also ran the tests with images of other animals and objects in order to better eliminate chance and left/right bias.

This video makes the tests pretty clear:

Dogs are a very social species, and the mechanism they have adapted in order to coexist with both humans and other dogs are fascinating, aren’t they?