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Discrimination of and memory for others’ generous and selfish behaviors could be adaptive abilities in social animals. Dogs have seemingly expressed such skills in both direct and indirect interactions with humans. However, recent studies suggest that their capacity may rely on cues other than people’s individual characteristics, such as the place where the person stands. Thus, the conditions under which dogs recognize individual humans when solving cooperative tasks still remains unclear. With the aim of contributing to this problem, we made dogs interact with two human experimenters, one generous (pointed towards the food, gave ostensive cues, and allowed the dog to eat it) and the other selfish (pointed towards the food, but ate it before the dog could have it). Then subjects could choose between them (studies 1-3). In study 1, dogs took several training trials to learn the discrimination between the generous and the selfish experimenters when both were of the same gender. In study 2, the discrimination was learned faster when the experimenters were of different gender as evidenced both by dogs’ latencies to approach the bowl in training trials as well as by their choices in preference tests. Nevertheless, dogs did not get confused by gender when the experimenters were changed in between the training and the choice phase in study 3. We conclude that dogs spontaneously used human gender as a cue to discriminate between more and less cooperative experimenters. They also relied on some other personal feature which let them avoid being confused by gender when demonstrators were changed. We discuss these results in terms of dogs’ ability to recognize individuals and the potential advantage of this skill for their lives in human environments.

Eavesdropping involves the acquisition of information from third-party interactions, and can serve to indirectly attribute reputation to individuals. There is evidence on eavesdropping in dogs, indicating that they can develop a preference for people based on their cooperativeness towards others. In this study, we tested dogs’ eavesdropping abilities one step further. In a first experiment, dogs could choose between cooperative demonstrators (the donors) who always gave food to an approaching third person (the beggar); here, the only difference between donors was whether they received positive or negative reactions from the beggar (through verbal and gestural means). Results showed that dogs preferentially approached the donor who had received positive reactions from the beggar. By contrast, two different conditions showed that neither the beggar’s body gestures nor the verbal component of the interaction on their own were sufficient to affect the dogs’ preferences. We also ran two further experiments to test for the possibility of dogs’ choices being driven by local enhancement. When the donors switched places before the choice, dogs chose at random. Similarly, in a nonsocial condition in which donors were replaced by platforms, subjects chose at chance levels. We conclude that dogs’ nonrandom choices in the present protocol relied on the simultaneous presence of multiple cues, such as the place where donors stood and several features of the beggar’s behavior (gestural and verbal reactions, and eating behavior). Nonetheless, we did not find conclusive evidence that dogs discriminated the donors by their physical features, which is a prerequisite of reputation attribution.

Objective: The health professional's empathy has a positive effect on treatment outcomes and the well-being of both patients and professionals. The aim of this research was to assess the empathy levels of first-year medical and psychology students and to compare these levels with those of trained psychologists and physicians. In addition, we also analysed the potential effects of years of professional practice and the average number of patients treated on the empathy of professionals. Method: We evaluated cognitive and emotional empathy through the Interpersonal Reactive Index and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task. Results: The results showed that perspective taking in medical students was lower than that of psychotherapists, and psychotherapists and physicians reported lower levels of personal distress than psychology students. We did not find evidence of general detrimental effects of clinical experience on the capacity to feel sympathy and compassion towards others, but we did find lower empathic concern levels in those professionals with higher workloads. Conclusion: considering that these effects have been seldom studied among psychologists, additional longitudinal research might indicate how empathy is influenced by training over time. On the other hand, since emotional distress can be detrimental to the professional's performance, our results suggest that empathy needs to be promoted and trained, in order to preserve the ability to feel with others without falling into an extreme of emotional distress.