Introduction to special section on human-animal studies: Humanistic psychology contributions of Team Woof.

Abstract

When Tina Bloom wanted to do her doctoral dissertation under Harris Friedman's supervision within a clinical psychology department on humans' ability to recognize facial emotions in dogs, she received considerable opposition. Several administrators and faculty peers pushed back by asking, what does this topic have to do with clinical psychology? Bloom and Friedman's retort involved mentioning how many people develop fear of dogs, including occasionally rising to the level of phobia, after getting bitten, coupled with the speculation that this could sometimes possibly be due to confusing a dog's angry baring of its teeth with a dog's happy smiling. They argued that training dog-bite victims who were traumatized to differentiate between these two emotional presentations could possibly both desensitize and cognitively empower them with the skills to overcome their fear-and perhaps even appreciate dogs, and this required foundational-scientific work on humans' ability to recognize facial emotions in dogs. Their argument worked, and Bloom (2011) not only completed her dissertation but, when published as an article (Bloom & Friedman, 2013) and later a chapter (Bloom & Friedman, 2014), it went viral, being widely covered by national (Boyle, 2013) and even international (Lusher, 2013) media. Due to this unexpected recognition, Bloom and Friedman informally created "Team Woof" to pursue this line of research, which included obtaining grant funding used to successfully replicate and extend the initial study (Bloom et al., 2021), something especially pleasing in light of psychology's current crisis in which many headline-grabbing findings fail to replicate (e.g., Friedman et al., 2020). Melissa Trevathan-Minnis later joined Team Woof, and a number of other collaborations have ensued, including several international ones. Accordingly, we showcase some of our recent work in the area of human-animal studies from the tradition of humanistic psychology.

Introduction to this special issue on human–animal relations.

“…Editor-in-Chief Scott Churchill suggested converting some of the presentations into published articles in The Humanistic Psychologist . Guest Editors Harris L. Friedman, Tina Bloom, and Melissa Trevathan-Minnis (2021) organized a Special Section of Volume 49 (4) entitled “Human–Animal Interaction: Implications for Humanistic Psychology” pulling together some of the contributions to the 2017 Summit poster session.…”