Toward an Evolutionary and Syndromic Psychiatry: Dogs as a Comparative Model for the Neuroscience of Psychopathology

Psychiatric disorders arise from dysfunctions of neural systems that are deeply conserved across mammals, yet contemporary psychiatric classification remains fundamentally anthropocentric, relying heavily on subjective experience, symbolic language and self-report. This creates a major challenge for veterinarian psychiatrists and for comparative neuroscience: how can psychopathology be characterized across species when introspective access is unavailable? The domestic dog provides a uniquely powerful model for addressing this question, combining conserved affective and cognitive neural circuitry with species-specific socio-emotional adaptations shaped by domestication and exceptional phenotypic diversity generated by selective breeding. Here, we review the comparative neurobiology of cognitive and emotional regulation in dogs and humans, highlighting both shared neural architectures and critical species-specific differences in cognition, communication and social organization that limit direct transposition of human diagnostic categories. We then examine the principal methodological obstacles currently preventing canine psychiatry from becoming a mature neuroscience discipline, including the absence of standardized behavioral phenotyping, objective biomarkers, harmonized neuroimaging frameworks and operational diagnostic criteria. Building on recent advances in comparative neuroscience, evolutionary biology and dimensional psychiatry, we propose a species-centered syndromic framework in which canine psychopathology is defined through multidimensional profiles integrating behavior, physiology, neural circuits and developmental trajectories. This framework illustrates how comparative neuroscience can contribute to a broader evolutionary psychiatry, shifting psychiatric classification from language-dependent phenomenology toward biologically grounded, cross-species mechanisms of brain dysfunction. We argue that dogs are not merely translational models of human psychiatric disorders but a model system for developing an objective neuroscience of psychopathology.