Stress
Does having a dog nearby soften the stress of a traumatic film?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Watching a distressing film with a friendly dog made women feel less anxious afterwards, as much as having a friendly person there, but did not change their bodily stress response.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Between-subjects randomised experiment: participants watched an 11-minute violent 'trauma' film either with a trained therapy dog, a friendly unfamiliar woman, a life-size toy dog, or alone; self-report, cardiovascular and salivary cortisol measures taken before, during and after
- N
- N=77 · 80 women were randomised (20 per condition); 3 from the dog group were excluded, leaving 77 for analysis. A few further participants lacked physiological or cortisol data.
- Population
- Healthy female university students in Germany using oral contraceptives, without fear of dogs, prior trauma or psychiatric disorder
- Outcome
- Change in state anxiety (STAI-S) and positive/negative affect (PANAS) from before to after the film; heart rate, blood pressure and salivary cortisol responses
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Key findings
The film raised anxiety, negative mood, heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol in every group. After the film, the dog group reported lower state anxiety and negative affect than the toy-dog and alone groups, and did not differ from the friendly-person group; the condition-by-time interaction for anxiety had a partial eta squared of about 0.115. Positive affect fell equally in all groups, and there were no group differences in heart rate, blood pressure or cortisol (the dog group's cortisol increase was numerically smallest but not significantly).
Methodology
Healthy female students were randomly assigned to watch an 11-minute compilation of violent and sexual-assault scenes from a feature film either with a trained therapy dog lying beside them, with a friendly unfamiliar female student, with a life-size toy dog, or alone. Before and after the film they rated state anxiety and positive and negative mood; heart rate and blood pressure were recorded before, during and after, and saliva was sampled six times over the following hour to measure cortisol.
Limitations
The sample was only young, healthy women, so it is unknown whether men or people with PTSD would respond similarly; the trauma film is an analogue, not a real traumatic event. Participants could not be blind to condition, so expectations or demand could have shaped the self-reports, and the dissociation between subjective and physiological measures means the dog did not measurably dampen the body's stress response. Groups differed at baseline in attitudes to pets (though in the direction that works against the dog effect), and intrusive memories after the film, the key PTSD-relevant outcome, were not measured.
How this study connects
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