Valerie to her own anxiety. According to Valerie,
Bella was redirecting her owner so that she could
get back to what she was supposed to be doing. “I
don’t know where I would be if I didn’t have her.”
While Valerie and Bella have an unusual relation-
ship because Bella is a trained service dog, there is
a growing body of scientific evidence that animals,
task-trained or not, can improve our mental health.
Research since the 1980s has pointed to the physi-
cal benefits of pets, specifically dogs. From decreas-
ing blood pressure and cholesterol levels to even
helping young children fend off allergies, research
has explored the physical evidence. But interacting
with a pet, or even with an unknown animal, can
help diminish stress, provide relief from symptoms
of anxiety and aid with depression.
Sandra Barker, a professor of psychiatry and
the director of the School of Medicine Center for
Human-Animal Interaction at Virginia Common-
wealth University, has been studying the benefits
of the human-animal bond for nearly two decades.
“When humans are with pets, their social interac-
tion increases—even children with developmen-
tal disabilities exhibit more prosocial behavior,”
Barker says. She adds that studies have found that
interacting with pets is linked to a decrease in lev-
els of the stress hormone cortisol and an increase
in oxytocin, which aids in social bonding. “On both
the pet-ownership side and the animal-assisted-
intervention side, we’re seeing increasing evidence
of the benefits.”
Animal-assisted therapy is a growing therapeu-
tic intervention that uses animals, including dogs,
cats and horses, to complement existing treatment
for depression, addiction, PTSD and autism. In
2009 Barker and her team of researchers studied
what happens inside our bodies when people inter-
act with therapy dogs and how that reaction might
differ from or parallel what happens when they in-
teract with their own pets. “We wanted to know
if there were physiological changes that occurred
with your own dog, because we often see similar
changes with an unfamiliar dog,” Barker says. The
researchers examined people’s brain activity after
doing a stressful task and then again after spending
time with a dog—their own or an unfamiliar ther-
apy dog. They also tested salivary cortisol levels,
heart rate and self-reported stress levels. There was
a consistent pattern of increased stress after com-
pleting the task and reduced stress after spending
30 minutes with a dog, Barker notes, adding that
“the changes we saw with people interacting with
their own dog were mirrored in those of individu-
als with an unfamiliar therapy dog.”
Another project at VCU asked patients to com-
plete brief satisfaction surveys after spending time
with therapy dogs. Out of a sample of more than
400 people, 90% said spending time with the ther-
apy dog improved their mood, 85% said they felt
more relaxed, and the majority reported that they
felt less anxious and less lonely. A third even felt
that they had less pain. “It’s pretty amazing that
these brief interactions are perceived by our pa-
tients as having some of these profound effects on
them,” says Barker. “When you think of how long
people have lived with dogs in the world, we’ve only
recently started investigating these amazing inter-
actions that take place and the benefits of them.”College has always been a stressful place,
and recent research has prioritized limiting those
stressed-out feelings. In 2018, Harvard Medical
School researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hos-
pital analyzed more than 67,000 health assessment
surveys filled out by students at more than 100 in-
stitutions and discovered some concerning figures.
Three out of four students reported having expe-
rienced at least one stressful life event in the past
year, while more than 20% of students reported ex-
periencing six or more stressful life events in the
past year. Even more alarming: 1 in 4 students re-
ported having been diagnosed with or treated for
a mental-health disorder in the prior year, and one
fifth of those surveyed had thought about suicide.
While seeking legitimate mental-health ther-
apy is always the best option for comprehensive
treatment, a recent study done at the University of
British Columbia found a simple action that could
ease stress levels for students. “Therapy-dog ses-
sions are becoming more popular on university
campuses, but there has been surprisingly little
research on how much attending a single drop-
in therapy-dog session actually helps students,”
Emma Ward-Griffin, the study’s lead author and a
research assistant in the UBC department of psy-
chology, told ScienceDaily.com. Published in 2018
in the journal Stress and Health, the study involved
246 students who were surveyed before and after
therapy-dog sessions. The students spent time cud-
dling and playing with seven to 12 therapy pups.