You've caught the flu and you really feel poorly. Rover watches your every move and won't leave your side all day, which is out of the norm for him. Could he be feeling empathy?

Two recent studies are moving us closer than ever to a definite answer. In a UK study, two researchers at Goldsmiths College in London, Deborah Custance and Jennifer Mayer, set out to determine if dogs are capable of empathy. They designed a clever experiment to test whether a dog's behavior around apparently distressed people is consistent with empathy.

First they gathered a group of largely untrained dogs, mostly mixed breeds of both males and females. Then they set up a situation with the dog's pet parent and a stranger to the pooch. The pet parent and the stranger would alternately talk, cry, or...

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