Entangled Bonds: Dyadic Dependence and Co-Regulation in Western Urban Human–Dog Relationships

TL;DR

This paper explores how human-dog relationships in cities help regulate emotions, but can also create stress for dogs under certain conditions.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of human-dog dyadic dependence as part of urban emotional infrastructure.

Findings

Dogs help humans with emotional recovery through shared routines and social interactions.

Chronic stress in humans can lead to increased vigilance and dependence in human-dog pairs.

Dogs without stable social buffering may experience negative effects from co-regulation.

Abstract

City life is increasingly optimised and predictable, yet often less physically shared. In this context, dogs do more than comfort people. By requiring daily walks and shared routines, they pull humans back into the physical world—weather, movement, waiting, detours—and this “analog friction” can support everyday emotional recovery. Dogs also change how people meet in public space. Their presence lowers the barrier for brief, low-stakes interaction, supports repeated recognition, and can help build weak but lasting neighbourhood ties. This review brings together research from behavioural science, physiology, psychology, and social sciences to show that humans and dogs often regulate emotions together. This coupling can buffer stress, but it is not always beneficial. Under chronic stress or heightened control, the same closeness may stabilise shared vigilance and dependence, especially when dogs themselves lack access to stable social buffering (including contact with other dogs). Seen this way, human–dog relationships are part of the emotional and social infrastructure of contemporary cities, with benefits for humans that may carry costs for dogs.

Urban contemporary living has increasingly shifted emotional regulation inward, away from wider social networks and into tightly managed daily life. Within this landscape, dogs can become regulatory partners whose presence reshapes human rhythms, attention, and everyday sociability. This review examines how urban conditions—including risk-averse caregiving, dense living, and reduced opportunities for sustained social contact—reconfigure emotional co-regulation within human–dog relationships and, in turn, human emotional environments. Drawing on research from behavioural science, physiology, comparative ethology, psychology, and the social sciences (2010–2025), it treats attachment, synchrony, and social buffering as interconnected processes. Across disciplines, evidence suggests that dogs and humans often settle emotionally together, showing coupled dynamics in behaviour and physiology. Such coupling can support stress buffering and recovery, yet under chronic human stress or heightened control it may stabilise shared vigilance and dependence, concentrating regulatory work within the dyad. These effects are conditional: when dogs lack stable, reciprocal social buffering—especially with conspecifics—the dyad may be less able to support recovery, and synchrony may tilt toward vigilance rather than calm. Seen this way, human–dog bonds function as part of the emotional infrastructure of contemporary cities, shaping how calm, uncertainty, and social contact are organised.

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