Everyone is familiar with that old saw about dogs looking like their owners……certainly, there are plenty of photos in this genre floating around the internet………

However, appearances aside, this common belief leads one to ask  – Do dogs often behave similarly to their owners? Or more precisely, do dogs and their owners share personality traits? Recently, a group of collaborating scientists from Eotvos University’s Family Dog Project in Hungary and from the “Clever Dog Lab” in Vienna, Austria asked exactly this question (1).

SHARED PERSONALITIES? 

Background information: Studies of human relationships provide quite a bit of scientific support for a hypothesis entitled the “similarity-attraction hypothesis“. Rather than the “opposites attract” theory that prevails on TV sit-coms and in romance novels, it seems that friends and romantic partners who share personality traits, communication patterns, and yes, even degree of attractiveness have reduced conflict and disagreements and are generally happier in their relationships than are folks who tend to…