We all love our dogs. But depending on how you show that love, you may be doing more harm than good, according to one expert.

Dr. Stanley Coren, a professor emeritus in psychology at the University of British Columbia, writes in a Psychology Today blog post that hugging a dog actually increases the dog’s stress level.

For his study, Coren looked at a random sampling of 250 pictures of people hugging dogs from Google Image Search and Flickr. “I can summarize the data quite simply by saying that the results indicated that the Internet contains many pictures of happy people hugging what appear to be unhappy dogs,” Coren writes.

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Coren, who has written several books about dog behavior, says there are specific things dogs do to indicate stress. At the “high-end,” dogs will “bare their teeth” at you. But dogs can still experience stress without lashing out. To read more from NPR click here.