Stressed people benefit from a pet

According to a new study by Kingston University London, a pet could help people who are less resilient to better cope with the stress of everyday life. However, an unhealthy attachment to pets – for instance when owners consider their pets more important than other people in their lives – can lead to increased feelings of loneliness.

Drawing on two surveys of more than 700 people from the United Kingdom and around the world (one conducted during the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic in May 2020 and the other in September 2021), the researchers examined whether owning a pet was associated with better mental well-being during the pandemic.

The analysis revealed that pets had a largely positive influence on their owners’ lives. Increased interaction with the animals – such as playing with them or taking them for more frequent walks – was associated with better mental health. Overall, owners who spent more time with their pets reported being happier. However, the scientists also found that an unhealthy attachment to pets was frequently associated with poorer mental health.

«It is widely assumed that pets are good for people. While our research supports this in part, I wanted to understand what role individual characteristics of people, such as resilience, play in the relationship between pet ownership and positive or negative mental health«, said the lead author of the study, Ece Beren Barklam, a doctoral candidate in the field of human-animal interaction at Kingston.

«According to the study, owners who considered their pet more important than the people in their lives were lonelier, unhappier, and less resilient. They also scored worse in terms of general psychological well-being. This type of attachment could be the expression of an unhealthy bond, in which the owner treats their pet as if it had human motives and characteristics, which could be a form of anthropomorphism.«.

According to the study's lead author, Fatima Maria Felisberti, a neuroscientist at Kingston and Barklam's supervisor, these findings could improve our understanding of the crucial role pets play in people's everyday lives.«We tend to oversimplify our view of why people have pets. Baren's research reveals the complexity of such relationships».