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

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.