Yes, You Might Really Look Like a Dog, Study Says

Pinpointing the golden retriever’s look-alike owner was a cinch. He had a goofy look and an easy-going smile, although his dog showed a little more tongue.

The woman with the spaniel had wavy, blondish hair with darker roots and a forward, friendly smile -- just like her dog.

Such findings have led two UC San Diego researchers to conclude that dog owners frequently pick dogs that look like themselves.

“We try to re-create ourselves in our companions,” said psychology professor Nicholas J.S. Christenfeld, coauthor of the article in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science. The story grew out of research last year in three San Diego-area dog parks.

Study researchers photographed 45 canines and owners separately and then asked reviewers -- 28 undergraduate psychology students -- to match the owners with their dogs. For the 25 purebreds, the reviewers made 16 correct matches and nine misses, but mutts were much harder to match with their owners.

That may be because people choose nonpurebred puppies without knowing what they will look like when grown, while those selecting purebreds know what to expect, concluded Christensen and his coauthor, psychologist Michael M. Roy.

“The results suggest that when people pick a pet, they seek one that, at some level, resembles them, and when they get a purebred, they get what they want,” the two researchers wrote.

Christensen added in a telephone interview: “The tightest resemblance might really be between your spouse and your dog, because you’ve picked both of them.

“This will make a lot of spouses unhappy, of course.”

Christensen himself owns a mongrel -- a mix that includes some Labrador retriever -- and makes no claims of resembling his dog.

His findings are receiving widespread attention on both sides of the Atlantic, prompting newspaper articles in the United States, Canada, England and France in the last week alone.

Anecdotally, people have long mused over supposed physical similarities between humans and their canines, a theme that appears from time to time in children’s literature, Christensen said.

He cites the tall, stately, black-and-white-locked villainess Cruella De Vil in the book and movie “101 Dalmatians,” who sought Dalmatian pups for both their looks and their stylish skins.

The new study is not the first to seek empirical evidence for physical bonding between people and dogs.

Overweight owners tend to have overweight dogs, according to one study published in Modern Veterinary Practice.

Canadian researcher Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, determined a connection between how women wear their hair and which dogs they fancy.

Women who wear their hair long, loose and over their ears showed a preference for dogs with long ears framing their faces, Coren concluded in his 1998 book “Why We Love the Dogs We Do.”

In his research, Coren determined women’s hairdos and then showed them pictures of four breeds of dogs: spaniels and beagles, with “lopped” ears; and huskies and samoyeds, with “pricked” ears.

Women with long hair generally liked long-eared spaniels and beagles, while those with short hairstyles revealing their ears preferred the short-eared huskies and samoyeds.

“We tend to develop a fondness for things we see frequently,” Coren said. If people are shown regular photographs of themselves and photos showing their mirror image, they tend to prefer the mirror-image photos, he said.

“You’re used to seeing yourself as a reflection,” he said.

Whether the owner-dog phenomenon applies to Coren himself is unclear: He owns a Nova Scotia duck-trolling retriever, a beagle and a Cavalier King Charles spaniel.

“I don’t think you’re going to intuit what I look like,” he said dryly.

At the citadel of the purebred dog world, the American Kennel Club in New York City, officials said they weren’t surprised at the findings out of UC San Diego.

“People are looking for features we like or are comfortable with,” said Daisy Okas, assistant vice president for communications at the nation’s leading purebred dog registry.

Terrier owners, for instance, are sometimes compared to the high-energy breed, she said.

“People may say, ‘He’s a terrier owner, through and through,’ ” she said. And toy dogs have become the stereotypical breed for the “ladies who lunch” and favor small companion dogs, said Okas, who prefers the high-energy, people-loving beagle.

But such generalities should be carried only so far.

After all, reviewers in San Diego mistakenly matched nine of the 25 purebred dogs in the study, and some longhaired women in Coren’s study liked short-eared dogs.

Take the common misbelief that Prime Minister Winston Churchill, with his bulldog-like face, owned a bulldog himself, Coren said.

In fact, the larger-than-life leader of the British Empire instead favored a “ladies-who-lunch” breed.

He preferred toy poodles.