Many years ago even before the high demand for Emotional Support animals and the beginning of the in-depth studies of how animals can help People under Stress, I experienced many situations when I saw dogs and cats react to Peoples's nervous and anxiety attacks. My first Panic attacks started when I was 12 years old at that time no one knew what a Panic Attack was and not even Psychologists could identify what was really happening, this was back in the late 60's. I was born next to a dog, she lived under my crib and she was the one who held me when I started walking, what I say by this is that dogs have been part of life since i was born. It was a family thing, my mother loved dogs and animals and created awareness of how much we can come to love them and how much they needed from us to care for them. I always remember that each time i felt the panic attack coming I would embrace one of our dogs instinctively and even to my horses and definitely would give me a soothing comfort and calm me down. To that times I never realized why was this and why the proximity of the Dog hugging or the Horse embracing would bring such peace to me. Now 55 years later I look back and those memories do have a meaning, now that all of these studies have been made and concluded that Yes definitely animals have a "magic" Instinct to sense what is happening around us, and is not body language only, they can really Sense when a person is in distress. I like to share information with my Southernwind Family and I found this NBC news article which I feel is interesting and share it with you all.
I
t starts as follows,
In an experiment, dogs were surprisingly accurate in detecting sweat and breath samples from people who were stressed.
It’s long been widely believed that dogs can detect extreme emotions by smell. Now scientists at Queen's University Belfast in the U.K. have proven that a dog's nose knows.
Acute stress changes the compounds found in human sweat and breath, research has shown. For the new experiment, four dogs were presented with sweat and breath samples collected from human volunteers — before and after the people engaged in a difficult math exercise.
The canine participants were able to detect with a greater than 90 percent accuracy which samples came from before and which came from after the 36 human volunteers had spent three minutes trying to count backward, aloud, from 9,000 in units of 17, according to the report published Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS One.
“This study provides further evidence of the extraordinary capabilities of ‘man’s best friend,’” said the study’s first author, animal psychologist Clara Wilson.
“While it is likely that in a real-life context dogs are picking up on our stress from a variety of context cues, we have shown using a laboratory study that there is a confirmed odor component that is likely contributing to dogs’ ability to sense when we are stressed,” Wilson said in an email.
For their study, Wilson and her colleagues first set out to train a variety of 20 pet dogs to point with their noses at samples from a person who was stressed. (By the end of the training period, 16 dogs had been withdrawn for a variety of reasons, including attention issues and boredom.)
The researchers tested the trained dogs with a machine that offered three choices: an unused piece of gauze, a sample from a stressed person and one from the same person when unstressed.
The researchers also collected before and after measurements of heart rate and blood pressure and responses to questionnaires that asked about the volunteers’ stress levels before and after the math task.
The dogs' accuracy at detecting the stress samples — from 90 percent to 96.88 percent — was even better than the researchers anticipated.
Knowing that chemical changes in sweat and breath can result from stress, it was expected the dogs might be able to smell the difference, Wilson said. "However we were still surprised the first time the dogs were shown the pre- and post-math task samples and confidently discriminated between them.”