Frustrated Dogs: Passing Emotion or Persistent Personality?
Frustration. We all know the feeling and it’s not good.
Frustration — for us or for other animals — is usually considered to be an emotional reaction to one’s current circumstances. The circumstances may be that something great was expected but not delivered, as would be the case if your dog expected yummy table scraps when she approached the dinner table, but instead she received a distracted pat on the head. Or the circumstances could be that your dog is motivated to do something but cannot, as would be the case if your dog was eager to chase a squirrel but couldn’t because he was on a leash.
Animal welfare scientists pay attention to frustration, because it doesn’t feel good to an animal, and things that don’t feel good are generally bad for animal welfare. If we can change the circumstances that lead to frustration for animals in our care, then we can enhance animal welfare.
Small grey and white wire-haired dog with mouth open on person’s leg. Photo by Dasha Urvachova on Unsplash.
But what if frustration is not a passing emotion, but rather a persistent personality trait?
A team of researchers from the University of Lincoln, University of Leeds, and Dogs Trust, all in the United Kingdom, recently proposed that dogs may be more or less prone to frustration in a predictable way throughout their life. That is, there may be a personality trait that increases some dogs’ tendencies to feel frustrated. A dog who scores high on this personality trait would feel more frustrated than another dog under the same circumstances who scores lower on the personality trait. And this would be true for the dog today, a year from now, and ten years into the future, because personalities tend to be stable throughout our lives.
In an attempt to characterize a frustrated personality trait, the authors devised a frustration questionnaire to be completed by dog owners. The questionnaire was designed through interviews with veterinarians, veterinary behaviorists, scientists, and dog owners, then completed by more than 2,000 people from 36 countries. They then strengthened their questionnaire by removing questions to reduce redundancy and to increase reliability, meaning that one dog would receive similar ratings whether it was rated by different people or at different points in time.
Through this process, the authors created a 21-statement Canine Frustration Questionnaire with statements such as “My dog engages in a repetitive behavior (e.g., tail chasing, pacing, circling) when unable to access something he/she wants,” and “My dog appears unsettled when there are delays in his/her routine.” People completing the questionnaire indicated the degree to which they agreed with the statement on a 1-5 scale. In the end, the authors found that the statements grouped together in predictable ways, and that the dogs’ scores were related to other measures of the dogs’ frustration. However, as the authors acknowledge, this questionnaire still needs additional validation to fully demonstrate that the questionnaire actually measures a frustrated personality trait.
How does this research help us help animals?
Animal welfare scientists have been talking about how the study of animal personality may help advance animal welfare (see the blog post about dolphin personalities), but the connection has always been a bit abstract. If, however, there is a personality trait that predicts the likelihood a dog will experience frustration, this information could be directly useful as people work to improve dog welfare. For example, the Canine Frustration Questionnaire could be used to select appropriate working dogs where frustration may contribute to success or failure in the role, or in the screening of shelter dogs to predict their ability to cope in the shelter environment.
I reached out to the lead author, Kevin McPeake, to share his thoughts on how the Canine Frustration Questionnaire can help dogs. He said:
“Frustration is commonly implicated in a wide range of behavior problems seen in dogs. We are therefore excited to have developed the Canine Frustration Questionnaire as the tool was developed to objectively measure frustration tendencies in dogs. It can be used both as a clinical tool as part of the assessment of canine behavior problems, and as research tool when frustration tendencies are being studied.”
Learn More
Intrigued? Try it out! You can access the Canine Frustration Questionnaire here. Scroll to the bottom of the webpage and choose the two files under “Downloads.” The scale and interpretation are free.
Article
McPeake, K. J., Collins, L. M., Zulch, H., & Mills, D. S. (2019). The Canine Frustration Questionnaire—Development of a new psychometric tool for measuring frustration in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris). Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 6, 152. Link to full open-access article.
