Signs Your Dog Feels Good: How to Tell If Your Dog Is Really Doing Well

Your dog eats, sleeps, comes along on walks and causes no trouble. Does that mean he is doing well?

The question is harder to answer than it sounds. Having no problems and feeling good are two different things, and this is exactly where most misreadings begin. A quiet dog may be relaxed, or he may have shut down. A wagging dog may be happy, or he may be caught in a conflict. And the most common reason a dog suddenly seems different is not one that a training plan will fix.

This guide brings together what well-being can actually be read from, which signs are routinely read the wrong way, and what part you yourself play in it.

1. What “feeling good” actually means

Before you can recognize something, you need to know what you are looking for. And that is where the problem starts: most of us unconsciously check for absence. He isn’t limping, he isn’t trembling, he isn’t barking at the neighbors – so everything is fine.

1.1 No suffering is not the same as a good life

This narrow view is exactly what animal welfare science has moved beyond over the past three decades. A widely used assessment framework, the Five Domains Model in the version by Mellor and colleagues (2020), organizes an animal’s welfare along five areas: nutrition, physical environment, health, behavioral interactions and – as the result of the other four – mental state.

What matters about this model is the direction it looks in. The first four areas ask not only what is missing or what hurts, but also what is present: Can the dog explore? Does he have the social contact he wants? Can he do the things his species is equipped for? A dog who is in no pain but spends eight hours alone in an under-stimulating apartment meets the first standard and not the second.

How far this goes: The Five Domains Model is an organizing framework, not a measurement method. The authors state explicitly that it cannot be used to calculate an overall quality-of-life score, because nobody can say how heavily the individual experiences weigh against one another. It tells you where to look. It does not tell you how many points your dog scores.

1.2 The underlying mood beneath behavior

Alongside the current state there is something slower-moving: the underlying mood from which a dog evaluates ambiguous situations. Research tests this with decision tasks in which one position is neither clearly good nor clearly bad.

Mendl and colleagues (2010) applied this to dogs. Animals that showed strong separation-related behavior in a separation test responded more hesitantly to ambiguous stimuli – as if they were more likely to expect the unfavorable outcome. The authors interpret this as a sign of a more negative background mood that persists even when the dog is not alone.

In practical terms, well-being is not just a question of how your dog is lying there at this moment, but also of the expectation he brings into new situations. A dog who treats unfamiliar things as threatening by default is likely to have fewer good moments, even when nothing is happening. How robust this method is and where it reaches its limits is covered in our research article Cognitive Bias in Dogs: Measuring Optimism, Pessimism and Mood.

1.3 Why a single signal proves nothing

The uncomfortable news comes from Tami and Gallagher (2009). Sixty observers – owners, veterinarians, dog trainers and people with no dog experience – were asked to classify the behavior of nine dogs in video clips. Experience with dogs made no statistically significant difference. The differences lay between individual people, across all four groups.

Indifference, fear, friendliness and play invitation were recognized well. For aggression, self-confidence and actual play, the judgments diverged widely. And the feature people relied on most often was tail movement – of all things, a signal that on its own pins down very little.

How far this goes: The study worked with video clips, not with people’s own dogs in everyday life. Someone who has known their dog for years probably reads him better than an unfamiliar recording. So the finding does not devalue your observations; it warns against the shortcut of one feature, one verdict.

The sound conclusion is simple. Always read the whole picture – posture, face, tail, direction of movement, situation – and only then draw a line. Why you cannot infer feelings directly from visible behavior anyway is explained in detail in Behavior Does Not Equal Emotion.

2. How you can tell in everyday life

The following five areas are what really holds up in practice. None of them is enough on its own. Together, in everyday life, they give a far more useful picture than any single signal – but that does not make them a scientifically validated assessment tool.

2.1 How he rests

A dog who is doing well lies loosely: his muscles are soft, he changes position, he rests his head, and he often lies on his side or curls up with his belly visible. He responds to everyday noises without getting up right away.

The opposite is not restlessness but tense stillness. The dog is lying down, yes, but in a sphinx position, legs tucked under, head up, ears moving, ready to get up. That looks like relaxation and can be standby duty.

Pay attention to how rest is spread across the day. Adult dogs need long stretches of genuine rest, and whether they get them depends less on the time of day than on their surroundings. A bed in the middle of the apartment’s through traffic rarely becomes a place of rest.

2.2 How he sleeps

Sleep is an area in which well-being can show up directly – and one that is poorly observed, because it happens while we are busy with other things.

Kis and colleagues (2017) examined 16 family dogs twice each: once after a pleasant social interaction (petting, ball play) and once after an unpleasant one (separation, threatening approach, still face). Afterward, their sleep was recorded for three hours using non-invasive EEG.

The result is remarkable because it runs against the human pattern. After the unpleasant experience, the dogs fell asleep faster and spent proportionally more time in REM sleep. After the pleasant interaction, on the other hand, the share of non-REM sleep was higher.

Important for putting this in context: the study distinguished wakefulness, drowsiness, non-REM and REM. It points out explicitly that further subdividing non-REM sleep into light and deep sleep is not standard practice in dogs. So the findings do not allow any statements about “deep sleep.”

For you, this mainly means one thing: falling asleep quickly is not a mark of quality. Which hours-of-sleep figures circulate for dogs and why almost none of them have been measured is covered in Sleep and Learning in Dogs: What Polysomnography Has Established; what happens during REM sleep, in The Neurophysiology of Sleep in Dogs.

How far this goes: 16 dogs, a lab setting, a single sleep recording per condition. The finding shows that emotional experiences measurably change sleep. It gives you no threshold you could read anything off at home.

2.3 Whether he explores and plays

Exploratory behavior can be one building block of a positive welfare assessment. If it drops off noticeably, that can – together with other changes – point to strain. The sources do not, however, support a fixed sequence in which a dog cuts back on curiosity first and then on other things. Does your dog go sniffing in the woods on his own initiative instead of just trailing after you? Does he investigate new things in the home? Does he offer contact on his own?

The same applies to play, but with an important caveat. In a much-cited review, Held and Špinka (2011) laid out why play is popular as an indicator of well-being: it often disappears first when an animal is under pressure. But the same authors also present the counterexamples. Play can increase under stress, it can overshoot after a period of deprivation, and it also occurs under conditions nobody would call good. That makes play a useful indicator, but not an unambiguous one.

In practical terms: if your dog stops playing, that is a signal you should take seriously. Conversely, the fact that he plays is no proof that everything is fine. How to tell play from conflict is covered in The Neurobiology of Play in Dogs.

2.4 How he seeks contact

Here lies one of the most interesting gaps in our perception. Buckland and colleagues (2014) asked 445 dog owners in the UK and Ireland how they recognize positive states in their dogs. The survey distinguished between “happy and excited” and “happy and relaxed.”

For the excited state, the descriptions were detailed: barking, head up, big bright eyes, ears pricked, tail wagging, mouth open, active and playful behavior. The relaxed state was described much more sparsely: quiet, head lowered and resting, eyes closed or half closed, ears down, mouth closed, calm activity level.

The authors take this difference as a sign that the calm, contented state is less well understood or harder to describe. That matches what we see in training: owners recognize their dog’s joy at the front door instantly and fail to notice that the same dog has not truly switched off even once all evening.

How far this goes: An online survey of owners, not a behavioral observation. It shows how people describe their dogs, not how the dogs were doing.

How to recognize a solid relationship and what strengthens it is covered in Building Trust with Your Dog.

2.5 Whether he has any say

One point that rarely comes up in advice books: whether a situation is stressful depends not only on its intensity, but also on whether the animal can influence how it unfolds and whether it can predict it. Bassett and Buchanan-Smith (2007) pulled together the evidence on this in a review and distinguish two forms: temporal predictability (fixed or varying intervals) and signaled predictability (a reliable cue before the event).

How far this goes: The review draws mainly on laboratory and zoo animals, not on pet dogs. The basic principle probably applies across species; the specific recommendations for dogs are an extrapolation.

In everyday life, these are small things. Is your dog allowed to decide whether he goes up to the stranger? Does he sometimes get to choose the direction on a walk? Can he withdraw when there are visitors without someone pulling him back out? We have covered this in depth in Controllability and Predictability in Dogs.

3. Signs that are routinely misread

The following five are the most common misreadings we come across in behavior consultations.

3.1 The wagging tail

Wagging is not an unambiguous sign of joy. That is the sentence that clears up the most misunderstandings. A dog standing in a corner at the vet’s office, wagging with a low-held, fast-beating tail, is very probably not happy.

There is a finding on this that is often reported in shortened form. Quaranta, Siniscalchi and Vallortigara (2007) measured in 30 dogs that the tail does not wag symmetrically: toward their own owner and toward an unfamiliar person, the swing to the right was stronger; toward a large unfamiliar dog, the swing was stronger to the left. Siniscalchi and colleagues (2013) were able to show that dogs notice this difference: when watching videos of left-biased wagging, they showed higher cardiac activity and more signs of tension than with right-biased wagging.

How far this goes: This is a lab finding based on video analysis and averaged swing angles. One of the researchers involved has said himself that it can hardly be checked outside the lab. You will not see the side bias from the sidewalk. What you take away is the basic point: the tail carries more information than “good” or “bad,” and wagging alone tells you little. More on this in Laterality in Dogs: Tail, Gaze, Nose and What Side Bias Shows.

3.2 Panting, yawning, licking

These three appear on every list of stress signals, and they do belong there – just not as standalone evidence.

Beerda and colleagues (1998) exposed ten dogs to six different unpleasant stimuli while simultaneously recording behavior, saliva cortisol and heart rate. With the stimuli the dog could see coming, restlessness, a lowered body posture, shaking, oral behaviors and, to a lesser extent, yawning and an open mouth occurred – without any change in cortisol levels. With the unpredictable stimuli, it was the other way around.

That is why a single yawn decides nothing. Panting can be temperature regulation, exertion, excitement or stress. Licking the nose can be an appeasement gesture or a response to the smell of food. Only an accumulation of these signals in a situation where there is no harmless reason for them turns them into a signal. A detailed overview is in Reading Dog Body Language and, for the stages of escalation, in Warning Signals in Dogs.

3.3 The quiet dog

This is one of the most consequential misreadings, because it reassures you in the wrong direction.

A dog who shows little may be relaxed. But he may also have learned that his behavior changes nothing, and therefore stopped showing anything at all. From the outside, both look similar – until you look at what should also be there: interest in the surroundings, initiative of his own, offers of contact, exploration, expressed needs. Where these things are missing, silence is not a good sign.

This is especially relevant after unpleasant methods have been used. A behavior can be suppressed without any improvement in the underlying state. Karagiannis, Burman and Mills (2015) examined this distinction in separation-related problems – albeit during treatment with medication and a behavior plan, not after punishment – and in doing so recorded not only behavior but also decision-making tendencies under ambiguity, in order to tell whether the dog’s state had improved or only the visible behavior had diminished.

This is also our professional position: punishment can stop behavior in the short term. The crucial question is what was learned in the process, and at what cost – a stopped behavior is not automatically a resolved one. Related reading: The Fallout of Aversives and Learned Helplessness in Dogs.

3.4 The “guilty look”

Lowered head, averted gaze, ears pinned back when you find the chewed-up remote: that looks like a guilty conscience and is very probably something else. Horowitz (2009) tested this experimentally with 14 dogs, separately varying whether the dog had actually done something forbidden and whether the owner believed it had. The “guilty” behaviors depended on whether the dog was scolded, not on what the dog had done beforehand – and were in fact most pronounced in dogs that had done nothing wrong at all. We cover this fully in The Guilty Look in Dogs: What the Behavior Actually Signals.

For the question of well-being, this is more than a curiosity. If you read the look as an admission of guilt, you see insight where appeasement is happening – and you keep scolding, because the dog has “understood” after all.

3.5 The dog who rolls onto his back

An exposed belly is almost always taken as an invitation for a belly rub. Sometimes that is right: a loose, relaxed dog who rolls over while being petted, soft muscles, mouth slightly open, tail moving. Sometimes it is not: a dog who quickly throws himself onto his back as you approach, with a stiff posture, head turned away, legs drawn in and a fixed stare, is probably not offering a belly rub; his behavior is more likely to serve to defuse the situation.

The difference lies in the tension and in who started it. Two clues help: does the dog stop when you stop? And does he seek contact again on his own afterward? If not, it was probably not an invitation.

Note: This section describes observations from our training practice, not the result of a study.

4. Recovery after excitement

A helpful additional angle from training practice is recovery after excitement. It is not the exciting moment itself that says much about well-being, but what happens afterward.

Every dog has moments of high arousal. That is normal and part of a good life. What matters is not a fixed time span or a fixed sequence, but whether your dog finds his way back to his individual baseline. If he can’t manage that for hours – if after the walk he keeps pacing around for a long time, panting, standing at the door and revving up again at every noise – that is a warning sign, regardless of how cheerful he seemed beforehand.

Note: This section describes an observation from training practice. We are not aware of any study that has tested a specific recovery window in dogs as a measure of well-being.

This also gives you a useful yardstick for activities. The best activity is not the longest or the most strenuous, but the one after which your dog can contentedly switch off. If you stack up arousal all day and never check recovery, you risk ending up with a dog who needs more and more and finds it harder and harder to settle. What happens physically in the process is covered in Arousal Regulation in Dogs: Self-Control, Learning and Calm.

Over the long term, cortisol exposure across weeks and months can be examined in hair. How clearly this allows conclusions about chronic stress is limited, however. What this measurement can and cannot do is covered in Chronic Stress in Dogs: Neurobiology, Cortisol and Long-Term Behavioral Impact.

5. When something changes, think of the body first

A common mistake in behavior consulting is to train first and examine only afterward.

Mills and colleagues (2020) brought together the literature, the results of an expert workshop and their own case figures from behavioral medicine referrals, and additionally analyzed 100 recent dog cases from several authors. Across the different authors, the proportions involving pain ranged from 28 to 82 percent; the review of the 100 cases yielded a conservative estimate of roughly a third. Their conclusion is clear: it is generally better to treat suspected pain first than to check its significance only once behavior therapy fails to work.

How far this goes: The paper is explicitly set up as a commentary, not a systematic review, and the cases come from specialized behavior clinics. Dogs that end up there are preselected; the proportions cannot be transferred to dogs in general. What the figures do show is something else: pain can play a substantial role in behavioral medicine cases and is easily overlooked.

Behavior changes where a veterinary checkup is especially worthwhile:

• Withdrawal and less contact-seeking, especially when it creeps in gradually.
• Irritability that wasn’t there before – growling when touched, a shorter fuse in encounters.
• Changed lying behavior: different spots, frequent repositioning, hesitating before lying down or getting up.
• Reluctance to move, which is easily written off as the calm of old age.
• New noise sensitivity – the link with pain is particularly well documented here; see Noise Sensitivity in Dogs.
• Disorientation, changed sleep patterns or house soiling in older dogs; see Cognitive Dysfunction Syndrome (CDS) in Dogs.

For more depth: Recognizing Pain in Dogs, Chronic Pain and Behavior: Osteoarthritis and Aggression in Dogs and Osteoarthritis in Dogs.

6. Your part: how your mood carries over

You know the feeling: after a stressful day, your dog seems restless, sticks to you like glue or reacts more tensely to other dogs. When you are relaxed, he contentedly lies down next to you.

Observations like these are probably not a coincidence. Dogs perceive our state through body language, voice and probably also smell – and respond to it.

6.1 Perceiving emotions

The first step is perception: does a dog register at all what state the other individual is in? There are two well-designed studies on this.

Somppi and colleagues (2016) used eye tracking to record how 31 dogs looked at photos of human and dog faces with threatening, friendly and neutral expressions. The expression changed their gazing behavior – and did so depending on the species shown: threatening dog faces drew increased attention, while threatening human faces tended to trigger gaze avoidance.

Albuquerque and colleagues (2016) demonstrated something remarkable: dogs match a facial expression with the corresponding vocalization, across two sensory channels – for humans and for other dogs alike. This so-called cross-modal integration is considered an indication that dogs do not merely distinguish individual stimuli, but represent emotional states as such.

Both studies show that dogs take in and distinguish emotional information. They do not yet show that dogs take on the state themselves – that is a separate question. How far this perception reaches is covered in How Dogs Perceive Human Emotions.

6.2 Getting in sync

The second step has a name of its own. In behavioral research it is called emotional contagion: one individual takes on the emotional state of another without experiencing its cause directly. So perceiving and taking on are not the same thing, even if the two blend into each other in everyday life.

Katayama and colleagues (2019) compared the heart rate variability of owners and dogs while the owners went through a stressful task. The synchrony of the readings was more pronounced in pairs who had lived together longer. That is compatible with an influence of shared experience, but it does not prove that the effect was learned.

How far this goes: The study started with 34 pairs; because of technical problems with the ECG recordings, only 14 were included in the analysis. What was measured was a parallel course of heart readings, not a feeling.

6.3 What it isn’t: mirror neurons

Advice books like to explain this transfer with mirror neurons. That is not supported in dogs: mirror neurons were described in macaques, their role in humans is still debated today, and in dogs there is no evidence that such cells exist.

What has been described in dogs are phenomena such as emotional contagion, behavioral synchronization and – in play between dogs – rapid mimicry: Palagi, Nicotra and Cordoni (2015) found that dogs playing together imitate their partner’s play bow and relaxed open mouth within one second, and do so more often the more closely bonded the two are. This explicitly concerns play between dogs. It does not settle which mechanisms mediate the transfer between humans and dogs in detail. The effect stays the same; only the explanation differs from the popular one.

6.4 Which channels it runs through

Your state reaches your dog through several routes:

• Body language – posture, muscle tension, gestures, direction of gaze
• Voice – tone, volume, speaking speed
• Movement – pace, steadiness, sudden changes of direction
• Smell – people give off altered body odors under stress, and dogs can respond to them.

The odor channel has now been studied twice. In a double-blind experiment, Wilson and colleagues (2022) showed that trained dogs could tell apart combined breath and sweat samples from the same person taken before and after a stressful arithmetic task. Parr-Cortes and colleagues (2024) went a step further: the odor of a stressed person unknown to the dog changed the decision-making of 18 dogs in a test with ambiguous food locations – they approached the ambiguous location more hesitantly.

How far this goes: Both are small lab experiments, the second using odor samples from three unfamiliar people. Which substances are involved is not known; the popular claim that it is cortisol in sweat goes beyond the data.

6.5 Long-term cortisol synchronization

A Swedish study by Sundman and colleagues (2019) compared the cortisol stored in the hair of 58 human–dog pairs, which is used as a marker of longer-term cortisol exposure. The levels were synchronized.

The direction is notable: the association was shaped more by the human’s personality than by the dog’s. The authors interpret this as meaning that the dog is more likely to pick up the human’s state than the other way around.

How far this goes: An observational study of 33 Shetland Sheepdogs and 25 Border Collies, all of whose owners were women. Cortisol is also not a pure stress gauge. The study shows synchronization, not a chain of cause and effect.

6.6 How this shows up in everyday life

When you are …	… your dog often responds with …
relaxed and calm	balance, able to switch off
nervous and hectic	restlessness, increased urge to move, stronger reactions to environmental stimuli
tense or anxious	caution, seeking closeness, avoidance behavior of his own
frustrated or irritable	insecurity, withdrawal, frustrated barking

This table describes patterns from training practice, not study results. It is meant as orientation, not as a rule – your dog may respond differently in any row.

An example: You see another dog in the distance. Even before the encounter happens, you tense your shoulders, grip the leash tighter, hold your breath. Your change can make the situation additionally significant for him and help shape his reaction. Whether he then barks or pulls can also have many other causes. What else comes together on the leash is covered in Leash Reactivity in Dogs.

6.7 Body language and voice

You can say “everything’s fine” – but if your body tension signals something different from your words, your body language can also influence how your dog reacts.

• Body tension. Stiff shoulders, bent arms, a frozen core.
• Gaze. If you fixate on a stimulus, your dog may follow your gaze and orient toward it as well.
• Breathing. Holding your breath changes your entire posture and with it what your dog sees.
• Voice. An irritated, shrill tone has a different effect than a calm, even way of speaking.

And the reverse holds too: comforting your dog in a moment of fear does not reinforce the fear in the sense of a reward. Why this persistent claim rests on a misunderstanding is explained in Comforting a Fearful Dog.

6.8 Your mood in training

Precision pays off here, because the popular version claims more than the research supports.

An early experimental study on this comes from Sümegi, Oláh and Topál (2014). Owners went through either a stressful or a neutral situation, after which the dog solved a spatial memory task.

The result went in the opposite direction from what is often claimed: the dogs performed better after their owner had been exposed to the stressful situation. The authors take this as evidence of transfer – short-term tension is known to often improve memory performance, in humans and animals alike.

What this finding shows: a transfer can take place, and it can be measured. What it does not show: that a relaxed person automatically has the dog who learns better. Short-term tension in a memory task is something different from a permanently tense training atmosphere.

Why the recommendation still holds: It rests on other grounds. Long-term hair cortisol levels of humans and dogs can correlate with each other. Impatience can lead to inconsistent criteria and poorer timing. And frustration on both sides can make training situations unpleasant – which can lower the willingness to engage with them.

So if your dog “isn’t listening,” it is worth looking inward. Just as a training question, not as stress physiology. How motivation can tip over in the process is covered in Motivation in Dog Training.

We have covered mood transfer in full in a separate article: Emotional Contagion in Dogs: Can Human Stress Influence Canine Stress Responses?

7. Your dog is a mirror – but not a perfect reflection

The term contains a kernel of truth, but it is misleading if you take it literally.

Your dog has his own experiences, his own evaluations and his own perception. He can pick up your tension and at the same time have feelings of his own about the situation. If he seems unsure during an encounter with another dog, that may be due to your tension, his past experiences, the other dog’s body language – or a combination.

This distinction is more than a fine point. If you read every behavior of your dog as a mirror of your own state, you overlook the other causes – and may blame yourself where pain, genetics or simply a difficult situation would be the explanation. That dogs differ considerably in their basic makeup is well documented; see Temperament, Personality, and Coping Styles in Dogs.

8. What you can do in concrete terms

8.1 Observe

Your dog can be a useful source of feedback. If he suddenly reacts differently than usual, three questions make sense: Am I tense myself right now? Do I come across as unsure? Have I built up pressure without noticing?

And a fourth that is just as important: Could it be about him – a past experience, the situation, pain?

A simple approach that works well in consultations: for two weeks, write down three things every evening – how long your dog rested in one stretch, whether he explored or offered something on his own, and how long it took him to settle down after the most exciting situation of the day. After two weeks you will often see a pattern that escapes you on any single day.

8.2 Working on yourself

• Take a conscious breath before the walk or the training session.
• Release body tension – shoulders, jaw, hands.
• A calm voice, an even tone, even in critical moments.
• Soften your gaze. When you see another dog, don’t stare at it. Keep looking ahead, keep walking.
• Breaks after exciting moments – for both of you.
• You don’t have to be perfect. What matters is the general direction, not the single tense moment.

8.3 Working on his environment

• A real resting place away from through traffic, where nobody talks to him or touches him.
• Allow him to withdraw. When he leaves, nobody fetches him back – not visitors and not children either.
• Let him sniff. A walk on which he gets to use his nose has a different effect than the same route at marching pace.
• Create predictability without a rigid timetable: consistent routines, announced changes.
• Dose arousal. Better shorter and well recovered than long and wound up.
• Choose social contacts for quality, not quantity; see Social Contact for Dogs.

9. Conclusion

Whether your dog feels good is not something you read off a single signal but from a pattern: how he rests, how he sleeps, whether he explores and plays on his own initiative, how he seeks contact, whether he has any say – and whether he finds his way back to his usual baseline after excitement.

Three caveats belong with this. First, silence is no proof of contentment; it can also mean that a dog has stopped showing things. Second, with any change in behavior, the body comes before the training plan. And third, your dog is not a mirror of your mood: your state can demonstrably play a part, but he has his own experiences and his own reasons.

For you, this means both at once: you have considerable influence – and not everything is your fault.

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Quaranta, A., Siniscalchi, M., & Vallortigara, G. (2007). Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli. Current Biology, 17(6), R199–R201. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2007.02.008

Siniscalchi, M., Lusito, R., Vallortigara, G., & Quaranta, A. (2013). Seeing left- or right-asymmetric tail wagging produces different emotional responses in dogs. Current Biology, 23(22), 2279–2282. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.027

Somppi, S., Törnqvist, H., Kujala, M. V., Hänninen, L., Krause, C. M., & Vainio, O. (2016). Dogs evaluate threatening facial expressions by their biological validity – Evidence from gazing patterns. PLOS ONE, 11(1), e0143047. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0143047

Sümegi, Z., Oláh, K., & Topál, J. (2014). Emotional contagion in dogs as measured by change in cognitive task performance. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 160, 106–115. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2014.09.001

Sundman, A.-S., Van Poucke, E., Svensson Holm, A.-C., Faresjö, Å., Theodorsson, E., Jensen, P., & Roth, L. S. V. (2019). Long-term stress levels are synchronized in dogs and their owners. Scientific Reports, 9, 7391. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-43851-x

Wilson, C., Campbell, K., Petzel, Z., & Reeve, C. (2022). Dogs can discriminate between human baseline and psychological stress condition odours. PLOS ONE, 17(9), e0274143. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274143

Tami, G., & Gallagher, A. (2009). Description of the behaviour of domestic dog (Canis familiaris) by experienced and inexperienced people. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 120(3–4), 159–169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2009.06.009

How strong the evidence is

The studies cited differ considerably in scope and explanatory power.

The Five Domains Model (Mellor et al. 2020) is an organizing framework for assessing animal welfare, not a measurement method and not an empirical study. The authors themselves state that it cannot be used to derive an overall quality-of-life score.

The experimental studies on perception, sleep, odor, tail asymmetry and the guilty look (Somppi et al. 2016, Albuquerque et al. 2016, Kis et al. 2017, Quaranta et al. 2007, Siniscalchi et al. 2013, Beerda et al. 1998, Horowitz 2009, Wilson et al. 2022, Parr-Cortes et al. 2024) are based on small samples under laboratory conditions. They show that an effect exists and can be measured. They are not suitable as a threshold for assessing an individual dog in everyday life.

The terms in this field are not interchangeable, and we keep them apart in the text: Somppi et al. (2016) and Albuquerque et al. (2016) concern the perception and discrimination of emotional signals. Katayama et al. (2019) and Sundman et al. (2019) concern physiological synchrony. Palagi et al. (2015) concerns rapid mimicry in play between dogs. Emotional contagion in the narrower sense – actually taking on a state – cannot be read directly from any of these studies.

With 14 analyzed pairs, Katayama et al. (2019) is the smallest of the studies named here; it started with 34 pairs. The synchrony found says nothing about the direction of influence and nothing about whether the effect is learned.

Bassett and Buchanan-Smith (2007) is a review on keeping animals in human care, drawing mainly on laboratory and zoo animals. Applying it to pet dogs is plausible, but it is an extrapolation.

Sundman et al. (2019) is an observational study of 58 pairs from only two breeds with exclusively female owners, and it shows synchronization, not causation. Buckland et al. (2014) is an owner survey and reflects how people describe their dogs, not how those dogs were doing. Tami and Gallagher (2009) worked with video clips of unfamiliar dogs, which limits how far the results apply to your own, well-known dog.

Mills et al. (2020) is explicitly set up as a commentary and combines literature, workshop results and the authors’ own case figures with a review of 100 recent dog cases. These cases are preselected; the stated proportions cannot be transferred to dogs in general.

Sümegi et al. (2014) is an early experimental study on whether the owner’s state affects the dog’s learning performance; further studies on the effects of human stress states on dogs have since been published. Its result is often reported the other way around in advice literature; we report it here as it was published and point out that it does not support the popular training recommendation. We therefore base the recommendation itself on other grounds.

The table on everyday reactions, the section on belly-showing and the section on recovery after excitement describe observations from training practice and are labeled as such.

Frequently asked questions

How can I tell that my dog feels good?

Well-being does not show in a single signal but in the overall picture. A dog who is doing well rests in a loose posture, has longer undisturbed sleep phases, explores on his own initiative, plays, seeks contact and finds his way back to his usual baseline after excitement.

How can I tell that my dog is stressed?

Possible signs include panting without exertion or heat, restlessness, frequent yawning, shaking off without being wet, withdrawal, trembling, increased licking or a lowered body posture. Individual signals are ambiguous and always have to be considered in the context of the situation and the dog.

Does a quiet dog automatically mean a relaxed dog?

No. A quiet dog may be relaxed – but he may also have learned to show little or to withdraw. What matters is whether he still actively shows interest, seeks contact, explores and expresses his own needs.

Does wagging mean my dog is happy?

No. Wagging can occur in very different emotional situations and is not an unambiguous sign of joy. A dog can wag with a low-held, fast-beating tail while being under considerable pressure. What matters is posture, face and situation, not the tail alone.

What can I do to support my dog’s well-being?

What matters is a suitable environment, an undisturbed resting place, enough sleep, preventive health care, choices in everyday life and activities that suit him. The best activity is not the longest or the most strenuous, but the one after which your dog can contentedly switch off.

How much sleep does a dog need?

The need varies with age, health, activity level and personality. More important than a fixed number of hours is quality: a dog should be able to settle down, sleep undisturbed and switch off again after exertion.

Why is my dog suddenly calmer than before?

A change in behavior should not automatically be interpreted as a normal sign of aging or as greater composure. Less activity, withdrawal or changed behavior can also result from pain or other health problems.

When should I see a veterinarian about a change in behavior?

A checkup makes sense if changes appear suddenly, persist for some time or come with other abnormalities. Withdrawal, irritability, reluctance to move, changed lying behavior or waning interest in particular can point to physical causes.