Just face it, you look like your dog

And now for some biting remarks and a few mutt points. A new study confirms that, yes, dog owners look like their dogs.

Convinced that choice of dog is a revealing thing indeed, Michael Roy and Nicholas Christenfeld — a pair of psychologists from the University of California at San Diego — proved it “empirically,” they announced Tuesday.

Do dogs and owners initially resemble each other, they wondered — or do they grow to look that way, in the manner of long-married husbands and wives?

The notion has long fascinated the human contingent.

“My fiance acts and looks like his dog. They are both thin but athletic. … Both get puppy eyes when you yell at them,” one woman noted in an online discussion of the topic recently at Dog Fancy magazine.

As part of their research, Messrs. Roy and Christenfeld went to three local dog parks and took 45 photos of dogs and 45 photos of their owners, all subjects making “whatever facial expression they chose,” they noted.

They then asked 28 students to pore over the photos and match dog with owner based on criteria that included “hairiness, size, sharpness of features, attractiveness, perceived friendliness and perceived energy level.”

Out of 25 photos of purebred dogs and owners, the students made 16 matches and nine misses. Because most of the human/canine pairs had been together only three years, the researchers concluded that dogs and owners do not grow to resemble each other — similarities are there from the start.

And it’s prompted by vanity.

“The results suggest that when people pick a pet, they seek one that at some level resembles them. … It does appear, as in the case of selecting a spouse, people want a creature like themselves,” the two state in their findings, published in the May issue of Psychological Science.

Nondescript mutts did not fare quite so well, however.

Of the 20 photos of “non-purebreds,” the student judges made seven matches, nine misses and four “ties,” convincing the researchers that purebred owners pick their dogs for those specific and recognizable characteristics that reflect their own personal traits.

Meanwhile, California-based sociologist Gini Graham Scott also has plumbed the depths of the subject in her new book, “Do You Look Like Your Dog?” published by Random House in January and dedicated to the “canine and the canine-obsessed.”

It is, she writes, “an irresistible twist on the separated-at-birth story — we discover that a grown man can look frighteningly like his Maltese.”

Miss Scott offers “What Kind of Dog Are You?” seminars to those who pine to know themselves through their dogs, along with a contest for people who look like their dogs and a companion Web site (www.doyoulooklikeyourdog.com).

She also is working on a reality TV show based on the phenomenon with a California film company.

But Miss Scott is a canny marketer. She has trademarked the phrase “Do You Look Like” for a whole series of projects about uncanny resemblances on our planet. She already has begun the search for people who look like their cats, their other pets or their spouses.