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| Title | Human-dog bond: personality and attachment |
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| Author | Lyckberg, Linnéa Klara Maria |
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| Contributors | Weiss, Alexander; Jarvis, Susan; Rhen, Therese |
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| Subject(s) | attachment; personality; dog behaviour; human-animal interactions; emotional intelligence; Ainsworth's Strange Situation Test |
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| Abstract | To assess variables associated with a mutual human-dog bond, a new scale was
developed to measure dog owner’s relationship satisfaction and Ainsworth’s Strange
Situation Test (SST) was used to measure the attachment of 65 dogs to their owners.
The owner’s personality was measured using the Mini International Personality Item
Pool and the dog’s personality was measured using the Monash Canine Personality
Questionnaire (MCPQ-R). Owners were asked to report the number of behaviour
problems displayed by their dogs and how frequently they interacted with their dogs.
Out of the dog and owner traits, only owner neuroticism was significant for how
bonded the owners were to their dogs.
The dogs’ behaviour during the SST provides evidence for the existence of groups of
dogs who vary in their attachment to their owner. One group was highly sociable and
showed similar behaviours to children with secure attachment. A second group had
low sociability and showed similar behaviours to children with insecure (ambivalent)
attachment. A third group seemed to have developed a bond to the owner, which is
specific to dogs. These dogs were highly sociable, independent and seemed to be
flexible in who they could gain safety and support from.
Owners who were less conscientious had dogs who showed signs of low sociability
and insecure attachment during the SST, and rated their dogs as lower in extraversion
and higher in motivation. Dogs who showed signs of high sociability and
independence during the experiment had been rated as more extraverted, less
amicable and less neurotic than those dogs who showed signs of high sociability and
secure attachment. The owners of dogs in the sociability/independent group reported
their dogs as having a larger number of behaviour problems than owners of the high
sociability/secure dogs. Owners of dogs in the low sociability/insecure group reported
having the strongest bond to their dogs. These findings suggest that the owner’s
experience of the bond does not reflects the dog’s attachment. |
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| Date | 2022-03-01T11:21:54Z |
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| Date | 2022-03-01T11:21:54Z |
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| Date | 2022-03-01 |
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| Type | Thesis or Dissertation; Doctoral; PhD Doctor of Philosophy |
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| Identifier | https://hdl.handle.net/1842/38639 |
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| Identifier | http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/1902 |
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| Language | en |
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| Relation | Lyckberg, L. (2014). The Human-Dog Bond: Exploring Predictors and Possibilities, MSc Thesis, The University of Edinburgh, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, UK |
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| Format | application/pdf |
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| Publisher | The University of Edinburgh |
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