Intraspecific Motor and Emotional Alignment in Dogs and Wolves: The Basic Building Blocks of Dog–Human Affective Connectedness

Abstract

Involuntary synchronization occurs when individuals perform the same motor action patterns during a very short time lapse. This phenomenon serves an important adaptive value for animals permitting them to socially align with group fellows thus increasing integration and fitness benefits. Rapid mimicry (RM) and yawn contagion (YC) are two behavioral processes intermingled in the animal synchronization domain. Several studies demonstrated that RM and YC are socially modulated being more frequently performed by individuals sharing close relationships. This evidence highlights the relation between RM/YC and emotional contagion that is the capacity of two or more individuals to share the same affective state. In this review, we try to delineate a possible developmental trajectory of emotional sharing phenomena by using, as a model species, the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris), a valid example of empathic predisposition towards individuals belonging both to the same and the different species. We contrast available findings on RM and YC in dog–dog and dog–human dyads with those in wolf–wolf dyads, in order to investigate if the ability to emotionally engage with conspecifics (wolf–wolf and dog–dog) is evolutionary rooted in canids and if provides the basis for the development of inter-specific emotional sharing (dog–human).

Social Stimulation by the Owner Increases Dogs’ (Canis familiaris) Social Susceptibility in a Food Choice Task—The Possible Effect of Endogenous Oxytocin Release

“…From those non-human species that have so far been used to study the analogues or homologues of human social behaviour, the domestic dog is especially important, as during domestication, it has adapted to the cognitively and socially challenging human environment [7,8]. Family dogs show several functionally human-like social skills and appear to be human-tuned in their social behaviour skills [9,10] and this enables them to achieve a higher level of synchronization when interacting with humans [11]. Dogs are equipped with skills necessary to establish behaviour synchrony [12,13], and they can efficiently use human behaviour as a cue for performing functionally equivalent 'imitative' response [14,15].…”

Yawn contagion promotes motor synchrony in wild lions, Panthera leo

“…One of the most parsimonious explanations at the basis of yawn contagion is the so-called 'chameleon effect' (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). The 'chameleon effect' predicts that the perception of a behaviour leads to unconscious imitation by the observer that in turn provokes an alignment of representations, also known as behavioural convergence (Arnott, Singhal & Goodale, 2009;Palagi & Cordoni, 2020). This convergence is highly adaptive because it can foster social cohesion, coordination and synchrony between subjects which do not necessarily share strong affiliation (Clay & de Waal, 2013;Lakin, Jefferis, Cheng & Chartrand, 2003;Preston & de Waal, 2002;Prochazkova & Kret, 2017).…”

The Power of Discourse: Associations between Trainers’ Speech and the Responses of Socialized Wolves and Dogs to Training

“…The sections in which moments of relaxation of the trainers—expressed through laughs—were more frequent may have influenced the wolves through contagion. Contagion has been considered adaptive because it allows animals to respond appropriately to different situations, a capacity that favors survival, increases reproductive success [ 41 , 42 ], and has already been described in wolves [ 43 ]. Feelings of joy may be communicated through positive facial cues (such as smiling) and vocal cues (laughter) [ 44 , 45 , 46 ].…”