考研英语阅读篇章: 狗会表现出的嫉妒行为
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This will not surprise most dog owners: Dogs can act jealous, finds a new
study from the University of California, San Diego. Darwin thought so, too. But
emotion researchers have been arguing for years whether jealousy requires
complex cognition. And some scientists have even said that jealousy is an
entirely social construct -- not seen in all human cultures and not fundamental
or hard-wired in the same ways that fear and anger are. The current study --
published in PLOS ONE by UC San Diego psychology professor Christine Harris and
former honors student Caroline Prouvost -- is the first experimental test of
jealous behaviors in dogs. The findings support the view that there may be a
more basic form of jealousy, which evolved to protect social bonds from
interlopers(闯入者).
Harris and Prouvost show that dogs exhibit more jealous behaviors, like
snapping(猛咬的) and pushing at their owner or the rival, when the owner showed
affection to what appeared to be another dog (actually a stuffed dog that
barked, whined and wagged its tail). Dogs exhibited these behaviors more than if
the same affection was showered on a novel object and much more than when the
owner's attention was simply diverted by reading a book.
"Our study suggests not only that dogs do engage in what appear to be
jealous behaviors but also that they were seeking to break up the connection
between the owner and a seeming rival," Harris said. "We can't really speak to
the dogs' subjective experiences, of course, but it looks as though they were
motivated to protect an important social relationship."
Since there had been no prior experiments on dog jealousy, the researchers
adapted a test used with 6-month-old human infants. They worked with 36 dogs in
their own homes and videotaped the owners ignoring them in favor of a stuffed,
animated dog or a jack-o-lantern pail. In both these conditions, the owners were
instructed to treat the objects as though they were real dogs -- petting them,
talking to them sweetly, etc. In the third scenario, the owners were asked to
read aloud a pop-up book that played melodies. Two independent raters then coded
the videos for a variety of aggressive, disruptive and attention-seeking
behaviors.
Dogs were about twice as likely to push or touch the owner when the owner
was interacting with the faux(假的) dog (78 percent) as when the owner was
attending to the pail (42 percent). Even fewer (22 percent) did this in the book
condition. About 30 percent of the dogs also tried to get between their owner
and the stuffed animal. And while 25 percent snapped at the "other dog," only
one did so at the pail and book.
Did the dogs believe the stuffed animal was a real rival? Harris and
Prouvost write that their aggression suggests they did. They also cite as
additional evidence that 86 percent of the dogs sniffed the toy dog's rear end
during the experiment or post-experiment phase.
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