Do Dogs Feel Guilt?

One aspect of the study of animal cognition is whether animals have emotions like humans. There is the primary set of emotions, such as fear and happiness, and the second set of emotions, such as guilt and pride. The difference between these sets of emotions is the fact that animals must have the theory of mind or in other words the ability to know that other humans/animals have different minds than we do and feel and think differently than we do. Humans develop this ability at about the age of 3 years old and scientists have been trying to see if this ability also exists in other animal species. Most recently, there have been numerous studies on the ability of dogs to have certain emotions like guilt. Most dog owners believe that their dogs feel guilt and display guilty behavior when they know they have done something wrong. However, the recent study by Hecht et al. (2012) went into detail about whether dogs display guilty behavior when they greet their owners, yet the tests confirmed that only by chance could owners actually tell if their dog had eaten a "forbidden" biscuit when they left the room or not. Most likely though it is actually just the dog's reaction to their owner's negative reaction towards them after they have done something naughty. For instance, if the dog is caught doing something it shouldn't be, the owner will most likely raise their voice and yell at the dog. This then sends the dog into a submissive stance which gives the impression of "I am sorry for whatever I did". Many times when this happens the owner stops yelling at the dog, so the dog then associates the submissive stance with having the negative reaction of the owner decrease. Although dogs may not feel guilt, it has not stopped the ability of people to share funny posts of their dog's reactions to what they do wrong. A website has even been created to post these funny incidents of dogs behaving poorly: http://www.dogshaming.com/

Reference

Hecht, J, Miklosi, A, & Gacsi, M 2012, ‘Behavioral assessment and owner perceptions of behaviors associated with guilt in dogs’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, vol. 139, no. 2, pp. 134-142.