Why some owners believe their pets feel complex emotions like jealousy, pride, and even guilt

A survey of pet owners suggests that people who feel less secure are more likely to believe their animals feel complex emotions. The study links those beliefs to how socially connected people feel in everyday life, not just to how much they enjoy animals.

Owners who lean hardest on their animals for emotional support are most ready to see rich mental lives behind a purr or a wag. The work focuses on adults living in the United Kingdom rather than on students in a lab.

Humans, pets, and emotions

The work was led by Elizabeth S. Paul, a behavioral scientist at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on animal emotions and on the ways people think about and relate to their pets.

Anthropomorphism – seeing nonhuman beings as having human thoughts and feelings – is common when people talk about pets.

Why do some owners go further and picture a full human style mind behind their animal’s eyes, as some theory suggests they might? 

Sociality motivation is a key piece of that theory. When people lack human connection, that drive may push them to search for connection in other places, including with animals.

Earlier experiments found that lonely students were more likely to describe their pets in human terms and as sources of comfort.

That pattern showed up both in people who were chronically lonely and in those briefly reminded of loneliness in one influential study. 

How the study was done

In the new research, 261 owners of a single dog or cat completed mail in questionnaires about themselves and one chosen pet. All were at least 30-years-old and lived in ordinary households across the south west of England.

To track how rich each person’s social world looked on paper, the team counted how many other adults and children lived in the home and how often owners saw friends, coworkers, or fellow members of clubs and church groups.

This gave a picture of structural social disconnection, having fewer people physically present in daily life.

To capture more personal worries about relationships, they measured interpersonal sensitivity. This term means, in plain language, a tendency to feel anxious in close social situations.

The questionnaires asked where owners would turn for help in common stresses such as bereavement or illness, their pet or another person.

They also asked which emotions owners believed their pet could feel and how strongly each person said they were attached to that animal.

Jealousy, guilt, and other pet emotions

The researchers asked about basic feelings such as fear, anger, joy, and sadness alongside more complex reactions like pride, guilt, and jealousy.

Many owners in this sample said their cats or dogs could feel these self focused emotions as well as the more familiar basic ones.

Owners who scored higher on interpersonal sensitivity tended to say their pets felt a wider range of emotional states, especially the complex ones.

They also more often endorsed difficult social feelings such as jealousy, embarrassment, shame, and grief when they thought about their animals.

Dog owners, on average, rated their animals as having a somewhat higher balance of complex to basic emotions than cat owners.

Cat owners, however, more often credited their pets with the basic feelings, so the pattern was not a simple case of dogs being seen as more emotional.

Older participants were especially likely to assume that their pets felt warm, supportive emotions such as love and empathy.

Age did not make people more attached to their animals, yet it still shaped which inner states they imagined.

Pets, loneliness, and social support

Across the sample, most people still rated social support from other humans as stronger than support from their pets.

Even so, more than 40 percent said their pet gave them at least as much support as the people in their lives.

For owners who lived alone, the pattern sharpened. People who did not go out to work relied more on their pets for help, while those with jobs leaned less on their animals.

Other research on pets and well being has found that animals can cushion people against stress and social rejection.

The Bristol findings fit that pattern by suggesting that strong pet relationships grow especially important where human connections feel fragile.

How humans frame pet emotions

Owners without children under 16 at home were more likely to say they felt very attached to their pets. For these owners, a cat or dog was more likely to count as a central social partner and key source of support.

These findings point to nurturance motivation which can persist even when no child is present. In that situation, a cat’s rush to the door or sulky retreat may be read as jealousy, pride, or guilt rather than simple habit.

The pattern also undercuts the idea that close pet relationships mostly reflect a lack of human contact. Instead, it suggests that subtle worries about belonging and about caring for others shape how people interpret what their animals do and feel.

“These findings support a link between social disconnection and anthropomorphic thinking in a community setting,” wrote Paul.

She also noted that different kinds of social disconnection could nudge different aspects of how people imagine their animals’ minds.

The study is published in Anthrozoos.

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