Hi Reader,

Dogs and humans share much of the brain circuitry that produces fear, anxiety, habits, and impulse control.

That's the starting point of a new paper by Floriane Fournier, Suliann Ben Hamed, and Clément Garin, published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews in September. They brought together what we currently know about emotional disorders in dogs, and asked a fundamental question: how do you diagnose a mental health problem in an animal that can't tell you how it feels?

What dogs share with us

In both species, the amygdala orchestrates fear and vigilance, the hippocampus stores emotional memories, the striatum drives habits and compulsions, and the prefrontal cortex helps put the brakes on impulses.

Dogs also show the psychological building blocks that underlie anxiety disorders in humans. Their fear can generalise to new situations that only look a little like the original one. Repeated mild stress can make them progressively more reactive (sensitisation). And they anticipate threats and rewards that haven't happened yet.

The authors are quite clear about what this means. Emotional disorders in dogs reflect changes in the systems that regulate fear, stress, impulse control, and attachment. They deserve to be taken just as seriously as the dog's physical health.

And where dogs differ

Of course, a dog's brain isn't a small human brain. Dogs have no symbolic language, and as far as we know they don't build stories about themselves. So human diagnoses that depend on those abilities, like the rumination we see in major depression, can't simply be copied onto dogs.

Dogs also have vulnerabilities of their own. Thousands of years of selection for closeness to humans has made them super social, and that may be part of why separation-related problems are so common in dogs and quite rare in other mammals. Many breeds were also selected for herding, hunting, or guarding, motivations that often have very little outlet in a modern home. One study the authors cite found that dogs walked only on-leash showed higher stress indicators than dogs who also got regular off-leash exercise.

One dog, three labels

This is the part I find most relevant for practice. The same dog may be called "anxious" by one professional, "fearful" by another, and "reactive" by a third, and there's no agreed way to decide between them. Most of what we know about a case comes from the owner, and what owners report depends on their culture too. Whether jumping up is welcomed or seen as a problem changes what ends up in the intake form.

So the authors propose describing each dog on several dimensions at once, rather than sorting it into one box. How strongly does this dog respond to threat? How impulsive or compulsive is its behaviour? How does its attachment system work? Are there signs of a more depressive, apathetic state? Sleep, appetite, and stress physiology get a central place, because a dog can't tell you how it feels, but its body shows it.

Does this mean we now have a finished diagnostic system for dogs? No, not quite. This is a review and opinion paper, so it proposes a framework without testing it yet. The authors say themselves that the evidence differs a lot between syndromes, and that the evidence for medication in dogs is still limited.

But I really like where this is going. A behaviour problem is rarely one thing. It spans the emotional, cognitive, physiological, and behavioural systems, and it makes sense to assess all of them.

What this means for treatment

The paper also describes what behavioural therapy needs to work: gradual exposure, calibrated so the dog experiences mild, manageable discomfort without tipping into uncontrollable arousal. Without that balance, the authors write, behaviour modification "consistently fails".

Noise phobias are a really clear example. The Noise Phobias in Dogs course will give you the full, evidence-based framework to assess noise phobias across all four systems and to set up exposure so the dog stays in the zone where learning is possible, so you can improve the welfare of the dogs you work with.

If you'd like to know when enrolment opens, join the waitlist. People on the waitlist get a special early bird price and an extra bonus.

Join the waitlist HERE.

Cheers,

Dr. Else
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Source: Fournier, F., Ben Hamed, S., & Garin, C. M. (2026). Toward an evolutionary and syndromic psychiatry: Dogs as a comparative model for the neuroscience of psychopathology. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 191, 106960. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2026.106960

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