Personality matching in owner-dog dyads

Abstract

Clever Dog Lab, Nussgasse 4, 1090 Vienna, Austria*Corresponding author: Phone: (361) 381-2179; borbala.turcsan@gmail.comPersonality matching in owner-dog dyads is relativelyunderstudied. The current research takes a cross-speciesapproach to investigate the relationship between the person-alitytraitsoftheownersandoftheirdogsandtheassociationbetween ‘‘relationship satisfaction’’ and dog/owner person-ality traits. 120 adult owners with one dog were asked to fillout two personality questionnaires and to rate their relation-ship with their dog on a 10-point scale. We compared theowners’ and the dogs’ personality assessment in extraver-sion, neuroticism, agreeableness and openness traits usingSpearman rank order correlations. Univariate GLM wasusedtoexaminetheeffectsofthehumananddogpersonalitytraits on the relationship satisfaction. Significant positivecorrelations were found between the owners’ and dogs’ per-sonality assessment in neuroticism and extraversion. Therelationship satisfaction reported by the owner was relatedonly to the dogs’ personality traits (neuroticism, extraver-sion), none of the human traits were associated with it.However, the assessment of the dog’s personality may bebiased by the owners’ tendency to project their own charac-teristics onto their dogs. To address this issue, we asked 26owners with more than one dog to assess both their firstand second dog. Owners assessed their first dog similarlytothemselvesinneuroticism,butthecorrelationinextraver-sion was not significant. In the case of the second dog, thecorrelation in neuroticism was negative, while in extraver-sion it was positive. However, the first and second dog didnot differ from each other in either personality traits. Thesefindings support that owners do not project indiscriminatelytheir own characteristics onto their dogs. Our results showa convergence between the neuroticism and extraversiontraits of dogs and their owners, which might be related tothenumberofdogsinthehouseholdandtheorderofacquir-ing the dogs.Key words: personality; owner-dog dyads; relationshipsatisfaction