My in-laws swear they have a spiritual connection to their dog. And I can't really blame them. I mean,

she always knows how to brighten their day and make them laugh. I think they like her more than they

like me. Can I even compete? Well, there's someone on this episode who can shed a little light on why

our dogs or your pet have such a hold on us. Jay Ingram wrote The Science of Pets.

He's here to explain when we get so intensely attached to our pets, especially dogs, and how

it's part biology, part a hardwired need for social connection.

Plus why needing pets around us is kind of a very human thing.

After that, some new canine skull analysis just dropped and will

change what you thought about dog breeding over the years. But first, let's talk about dogs and our

emotions. This is our all-dog episode just in time for puppy bowl. I'm Dr. Samantha Amin, and this is

Curiosity Weekly from Discovery.

Your mood can totally skew how you see the world.

Even the slightest snub from someone on an already bad day can feel super intense,

and yet a smile can light up everything around you when you're feeling good.

But here's where things get a little hairy, literally. A new study found that emotions and perceptions actually interact

in a surprising way when it comes to dogs. It turns out that when someone is feeling negative

emotions, they'll read a dog's mood as more positive, and when they're feeling positive emotions,

they'll read the dog's mood as negative. A team from Arizona State University showed this through two key experiments.

But first, they had to get the dogs in the right mood.

And the way the researchers did this was very cute.

One dog showed a positive expression after they gave him plenty of promises to visit grandma.

Another dog responded negatively to a photo of a vacuum cleaner. The researchers

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