Petting therapy dogs is good for college students, know why

Pet your stress away! For college students under pressure, spending time petting a therapy dog can work as the best stress buster. The study was published in AERA Open, a peerreviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.

According to the new Washington State University research, programs exclusively focused on petting therapy dogs improved stressed-out students' thinking and planning skills more effectively than programs that included traditional stress-management information.

The study demonstrated that stressed students still exhibited these cognitive skills improvements up to six weeks after completion of the four-week-long program. “It’s a really powerful finding,” said Patricia Pendry, associate professor in WSU’s Department of Human ‘Development.

“This study shows that traditional stress management approaches aren’t as effective for this population compared with programs that focus on providing opportunities to interact with therapy dogs,” added Pendry.

The researchers measured executive functioning in the 309 students involved in the study. Executive function is a term for the skills one needs to plan, organise, motivate, concentrate, memorize, “all the big cognitive skills that are needed to succeed in college,” Pendry said.

Pendry conducted this study as a follow-up to previous work, which found that petting animals for just 10 minutes had physiological impacts, reducing students’ stress in the short term.

In the three-year study, students were randomly assigned to one of three academic stressmanagement programs featuring varying combinations of human-animal interaction and evidenced-based academic stress management. The dogs and volunteer handlers were provided through Palouse Paws, a local affiliate of Pet Partners, a national organization with over 10,000 therapy teams.

“The results were very strong,” Pendry said. Pendry added, “We saw that students who were most at risk ended up having most improvements in executive functioning in the human-animal interaction condition. These results remained when we followed up six weeks later.”