In a groundbreaking 2024 study, Péter Pongrácz and colleagues explored how **intranasal oxytocin** affects human perception of **dog barks**, especially their emotional and acoustic content. The study targeted **40 healthy adult males** and applied a **double-blind, placebo-controlled** design to test how oxytocin influences stress and emotional evaluation triggered by barking sounds.
The researchers tested two competing hypotheses: First, that barks reflecting **negative inner states** would elicit human stress via interspecific empathy; and second, that **alarm barks**, due to their **high pitch and low tonality**, would provoke annoyance because they resemble **human infant cries**—a known biological trigger for emotional attention and stress.
Participants received either **intranasal oxytocin** or a placebo. After a waiting period, they listened to pre-recorded dog barks designed to convey specific emotions (e.g., **happiness**, **fear**, **aggression**) or mimic **alarm-style barks**. They then rated the barks based on perceived emotion and **annoyance level**.
Results showed that **oxytocin increased emotional sensitivity**: Participants given oxytocin rated low-frequency barks as more aggressive compared to the placebo group, suggesting heightened recognition of negative emotional cues. Conversely, oxytocin **reduced perceived annoyance** of noisy, atonal barks, indicating a stress-dampening effect on the more irritating acoustic properties.
This dual outcome—**increased emotional attunement** and **reduced irritation**—suggests oxytocin modulates how humans process canine vocal communication both emotionally and acoustically. It supports the idea that **dog barks communicate on two levels**: they trigger attention due to sound design and foster emotional connection due to their expressive content.
The findings have practical relevance: understanding how neurochemicals like oxytocin influence dog-human communication may inform **dog training**, **human-animal interaction therapy**, and even **urban noise policy**. It also deepens our grasp of the **biological roots of empathy and communication across species**.
Source: P. Pongrácz, C. A. Lugosi, L. Szávai, A. Gengeliczky, N. Jégh-Czinege, T. Faragó. 2024-01-14. “Alarm or emotion? Intranasal oxytocin helps determine information conveyed by dog barks for adult male human listeners.” BMC Ecology and Evolution, 24. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-024-02206-6
