It’s well known that dogs can sense our moods. It turns out, they can actually smell our stress.
The University of Bristol studied how human stress odors affect dogs’ learning and emotional state and it wasn’t good.
Humans can also subconsciously smell stress on others and it causes them to make negative decisions.
Ditto for pups. The dogs made slower and more pessimistic decisions and approached things cautiously.
They were able to be trained to react better to stress, though. That can’t be said for humans…yet.