, and It Goes Up — The Gift Your Dog Gives You
In 2015, a paper was published in Science that stopped me in my tracks: simply looking into your dog's eyes can trigger oxytocin release. Personally, one of the most quietly perfect moments in my day is sitting beside a dog, stroking its fur, and meeting its gaze.
When I was growing up in Korea, dogs lived outside, chained up all day. Their job was to guard the house, nothing more. Dog food did not exist — dogs ate whatever the family scraped off their plates. The term "companion animal" would have drawn blank stares. After my parents moved to an apartment and I left the country for graduate school, I went decades without a dog in my life. Then, five years ago, my younger son launched his campaign. He wanted a dog with an intensity that was almost operatic. My wife, who had a deep aversion not just to dogs but to animals in general, found the idea about as appealing as an earthquake.
But no parent ultimately wins a war of attrition against a determined child. Our son kept escalating, and right around the time my wife's resistance was crumbling, we started watching a Korean TV show called Dogs Are Wonderful. It shifted something in us: raising a dog, the show argued, teaches children responsibility while providing an emotional bond unlike anything else. We made our son solemnly promise to walk the dog twice a day, every day, and adopted a puppy. That is how "Gureum" — Cloud — became part of our family. Every walk and every act of care, of course, promptly became my wife's job and mine. But I loved Cloud from day one. The way he came running to the door when I got home from work, tail going like a windshield wiper in a storm — it was a joy completely different from raising two boys, and just as deep.
How Eye Contact Raises Oxytocin
When Cloud was a puppy, he would sit next to me begging to be petted but kept avoiding my eyes. Do dogs just not make eye contact? I wondered, and did not think much of it. But as Cloud got bigger, he started looking me in the eye. When we sat together and held each other's gaze for a long, quiet moment, something passed between us — wordless and unmistakable, as close to a conversation as silence can get.
Then I read the Science paper and understood the mechanism behind what I had been feeling. Dr. Miho Nagasawa brought 30 dogs and their 30 owners into a lab, let them interact freely, and measured their oxytocin levels. Nagasawa had already shown in 2009 that the deeper the bond between dog and owner, the longer they held each other's gaze. This new study tested a bolder hypothesis: that oxytocin was the chemical driving both the bond and the gaze.
Sure enough, the longer the eye contact between dog and owner, the higher the owner's oxytocin climbed. And the dogs' oxytocin rose right alongside their owners'. What made the study truly striking, though, was the control condition. When the same protocol was run with wolves and their handlers, oxytocin did not budge. Something had changed in the evolutionary journey from wolf to dog — the hijacking of the same hormonal system that bonds human parents to their babies. More recently, researchers have even shown that oxytocin is involved when dogs shed tears upon reuniting with their owners after being apart.1
To confirm that the human oxytocin spike was actually driven by the dog's gaze, the researchers artificially raised the dogs' oxytocin levels and then watched what happened. It worked exactly as predicted: dogs with boosted oxytocin looked at their owners longer, and the owners' oxytocin rose in response. This fits neatly with earlier work showing that when fathers inhaled oxytocin, they spent more time gazing at their children — and the children's oxytocin went up too.
We all know the experience of meeting certain people and walking away feeling warmer, more energized, more alive — and meeting others who leave us drained and irritable, regretting the whole encounter. Could oxytocin be the invisible hand behind these different reactions? It is worth thinking about. MRI studies show that the same brain networks for emotion, reward, and attachment light up when a mother sees a photo of her child and when she sees a photo of her dog. Perhaps companion animals have crossed some threshold and become genuine family members. Nagasawa's findings suggest that therapy dogs may offer real help to people living with autism, PTSD, depression, and anxiety disorders.2
The Gift Your Dog Gives You
One afternoon, I gave a lecture on oxytocin to a group of retired and current senior professors at Yonsei University. Afterward, over lunch, one of the professors came up to me. "I think you are on to something, Professor," he said. "I adopted a dog that had been returned by a previous owner. At first, she would not look me in the eye. But once she started sleeping in my bed, she began holding my gaze — as if she had decided to trust me. And she stopped barking at other dogs, too."
Of course, the dog may have simply calmed down as she settled into a loving home. But given the research showing that raising a dog's oxytocin makes it more loyal and sociable toward its owner, the professor's story rings true. And when I see people who can barely make small talk with strangers chatting easily with fellow dog walkers at the park, I cannot help but wonder: do dog owners walk through the world with higher baseline oxytocin?