Yelling at Your Dog Can Literally Destabilize Them, New Study Shows

If you’ve ever jumped after hearing a loud bang or felt the tingles while enjoying an ASMR video, you know that what we listen to can have a real effect on our physical sensations. And since dogs famously have a keen sense of hearing, it makes sense that the same is true for them. A new study published in PLOS One found that yelling at a dog has a significant effect on their center of balance.

Researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria surveyed a total of 23 dogs of a variety of breeds (five mixed breeds, five Labrador Retrievers, five Border Collies, two Golden Retrievers, one Standard Poodle, one Malinois, one Irish Terrier, one Pointer, one Greyster, and one Austrian Pinscher). Each dog had already received basic obedience training, including a “wait in a standing position” cue.

Once the dogs were familiarized with the room, each was individually placed on a pressure-sensing platform that picked up the dog’s minute movements and measured their centers of balance. The researchers then played audio of both happy and angry human voices. Each tone was played twice — once in a female voice, and once in a male voice. The same phrase was used: “venha cá,” which means “come here!” in Brazilian Portuguese, a language that was chosen because it was unfamiliar to the Austrian dogs in the study. 

The researchers found that both happy and angry tones can affect dogs’ balance. When it came to the happy voices, 57 percent of the dogs ended up off balance. The remaining 43 percent exhibited the opposite effect: They froze in place. This is normally interpreted as a fearful reaction, but the researchers theorize that the dogs may have frozen because they were anticipating something exciting. They might have associated the happy voice with playtime or treats. 

When listening to angry voices, the percentage of dogs affected was just 30 percent — but the effect itself was much more severe, considerably disrupting the dogs’ center of balance. 

“Compared to complete silence, hearing an angry human voice was associated with higher values of a parameter we call the area of the center of pressure,” explained study lead author Nadja Affenzeller on the university’s blog. This means that larger body movements were required for the dogs to maintain balance.

The study illuminates that dogs’ emotional and physical states can be affected by human voices. The researchers acknowledge that the sample size is quite small, though, so further research is needed. This is especially true considering how individualized each dogs’ relationships to tone of voice could be. 

“We believe that these findings provide new insights into the interplay between auditory stimuli, emotional processing, and postural control in dogs, contributing to a growing understanding of sensory-emotional integration in non-human species,” Affenzeller wrote.

It's yet another reason that positive reinforcement is much more effective when it comes to training your dog. Yelling doesn't just confuse your dog; it can also cause their center of balance to be totally off.