Dogs can smell when humans are stressed.
Dogs can smell when humans are feeling stressed
New findings have revealed that man's best friend is able to smell when humans are under pressure by detecting chemical changes in breath and sweat.
Scientists at Queen's University Belfast got four pooches - Treo, Fingal, Soot and Winnie - to sniff samples of bodily fluids taken from both stressed and relaxed individuals.
The animals were able to distinguish between the two groups with an accuracy of 94 per cent.
PhD student Clara Wilson said: "The findings show that we, as humans, produce different smells through our sweat and breath when we are stressed and dogs can tell this apart from our smell when we relaxed - even if it is somebody they do not know."
She added: "The research highlights that dogs do not need visual or audio cues to pick up on human stress.
"This is the first study of its kind and it provides evidence that dogs can smell stress from breath and sweat alone, which could be useful when training service dogs and therapy dogs."