This article comes by way of a co-worker of mine.
Of course I have to share!

Animal and human behaviour
Manager's best friend: Dogs improve office productivity

Aug 12th 2010 (http://www.economist.com/node/16789216?story_id=16789216)

OK. Here’s the plan THERE are plenty of studies which show that dogs act as social catalysts, helping their owners forge intimate, long-term relationships with other people. But does that apply in the workplace? Christopher Honts and his colleagues at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant were surprised to find that there was not much research on this question, and decided to put that right. They wondered in particular if the mere presence of a canine in the office might make people collaborate more effectively. And, as they told a meeting of the International Society for Human Ethology in Madison, Wisconsin, on August 2nd, they found that it could.

To reach this conclusion, they carried out two experiments. In the first, they brought together 12 groups of four individuals and told each group to come up with a 15-second advertisement for a made-up product. Everyone was asked to contribute ideas for the ad, but ultimately the group had to decide on only one. Anyone familiar with the modern “collaborative” office environment will know that that is a challenge.

Some of the groups had a dog underfoot throughout, while the others had none. After the task, all the volunteers had to answer a questionnaire on how they felt about working with the other—human—members of the team. Mr Honts found that those who had had a dog to slobber and pounce on them ranked their team-mates more highly on measures of trust, team cohesion and intimacy than those who had not.

In the other experiment, which used 13 groups, the researchers explored how the presence of an animal altered players’ behaviour in a game known as the prisoner’s dilemma. In the version of this game played by the volunteers, all four members of each group had been “charged” with a crime. Individually, they could choose (without being able to talk to the others) either to snitch on their team-mates or to stand by them. Each individual’s decision affected the outcomes for the other three as well as for himself in a way that was explained in advance. The lightest putative sentence would be given to someone who chose to snitch while the other three did not; the heaviest penalty would be borne by a lone non-snitch. The second-best outcome came when all four decided not to snitch. And so on.

Having a dog around made volunteers 30% less likely to snitch than those who played without one. The moral, then: more dogs in offices and fewer in police stations.

“Scratch a dog and you'll find a permanent job.”  ~Franklin P. Jones

We can all smile at the truth behind this quote. Taking care of animals can truly be a labor of love. Today, however, I want to share how my dogs actually paved the way for my career path. As some of you know, I graduated the University of Virginia with a PhD in neuroscience. It sounds super impressive and I will admit that some of the things I do are really cool (yes, that’s the technical term for it!), but anyone who has animals can understand the basic principles I work with day in and day out. Discovered by Ivan Pavlov in the early 1900’s, animals are motivated by food. In fact, they can make associations between anything novel (and not inherently motivating) and a food reward. Termed, classical conditioning, this is what every dog owner / trainer uses to teach their dogs. Growing up with animals and a mother who had been training dogs since she herself was a little girl, I took for granted how easy it was to use reward to get my puppy to “sit” or “down” on command. In fact, with a little encouragement from my mother, I came up with my first middle school science fair project that did not involve plants and sunlight. She suggested that I use my “animal training talent” and do something with my guinea pig. We sat down and decided that I would use classical conditioning to train my guinea pig that a bell predicted a food reward. I did these bell-food pairings over multiple days till one day, after I rang the bell, the guinea pig starting making excited vocalizations termed “wheeking”. I presented the project at the fair and ended up with 2nd place!

Not to be outdone, I decided that next year for the science fair, I was going to use my hamster (if you’re trying to keep track of my childhood animals…it’s a LOT and includes rabbits and horses to the already long list.) With the help of my grandfather, I made two equally difficult mazes. I made it so that one maze always had a food reward at the end whereas the other maze never had food at the end. I then timed how long it took my hamster to run each maze every day for a week. Surprise, surprise, learning is accelerated when there is a food reward at the end of the maze.

Although I only placed 4th that year, I had started something that would eventually shape the rest of my life. You see, due to this early experience with dogs, guinea pigs and hamsters I decided to work in a behavioral lab as an undergraduate in college. Turns out, I’m really good and training rats. One thing led to another and I decided to major in psychology and pursue animal behavior. I soon realized that in order to understand behavior, you had to know what was going on in the brain. From there everything kind of snowballed. I took a technician job at Johns Hopkins University, applied and got in to graduate school at UVA, graduated in 5 years with my PhD and moved one week after graduation to North Carolina to start working as a Post Doctorial fellow at UNC-Chapel Hill. Each and every experiment I conducted along the way dealt with reward and either classical or operant (must perform a behavior to get the reward) conditioning.

Throughout my whole career I have always been successful. I mainly attribute my success to luck, but I can’t neglect the fact that I have a way with animals. I have spent my whole life (even prenatally) with animals. Because of this comfort level, animals tend to relax around me and trust in what I tell them to do. Even now, I am called the “rat whisperer” in lab because I can take a very scared and freaked out rat and calm him down within seconds. Although this kind of influence over animals can be learned, I feel that my success in gradschool and now as a postdoc is due to the fact that I was immersed in a world of dogs and the basic principles of learning my whole life. So I guess you could say that I owe all that I am and everything I have accomplished to my dogs and my mother (and stubborn persistence).

Happy Mother’s Day Mom! Thanks for always being there!