Humans may not have a good understanding of dogs’ emotions, and it could be because they are projecting their emotions onto the animals. Researchers performed two experiments to look at how a human perceives a dog’s emotions. Over 850 people were recruited for the study. They were shown the videos and asked to rate how happy they thought the dog was. The researchers found that the humans’ perception of the dog’s mood was based on everything in the videos, besides the dog himself. The study was published in the journal Anthrozoos, and was led by Holly Molinaro, an animal welfare scientist and a PhD student of psychology, Arizona State University, US. The authors highlight that extraneous factorsBesides the dog itself are major contributing influences on how humans perceive dogs’ emotional state, the authors wrote in the study, which has been published by the journalAnthrozooos, a division of the American Journal of Psychology. The research was funded by the National Institute of Personality and Social Psychology, the University of California, San Diego, and the National Institutes of Mental Health, both of which are based in the U.S.