Paying Attention to Your Dog Improves Your Emotional State

A lot of research has found that being in the presence of, and interacting with, a dog can have stress-reducing properties for you. Science literature reviews have found that about two-thirds of the studies on this have demonstrated the beneficial psychological effects of pet dogs; however, the remaining third of the studies have shown no positive effects. What is the difference in the situations that find beneficial effects of dogs and those with no effect? A possible answer comes from a group of Canadian investigators led by Catherine Amiot from the University of Québec at Montréal. It seems that the variable that makes a difference in whether a dog makes your emotional state more positive or not has to do with how much attention you pay to your pet and how you do it.

Attention and Mindfulness

According to these researchers, the key to pet-assisted improvement of our feelings of well-being involves mindfulness. Definitions of mindfulness depend upon who is studying it and how it is applied. You may have heard the term mindfulness in conjunction with discussions about yoga, meditation, and Eastern introspective psychological practices. Buddhist psychology mentioned the concept of mindfulness over 2500 years ago and viewed it as a state of mind.

Western psychology tends to view mindfulness in a much more secular and pragmatic manner. Usually, it involves skills and techniques that focus attention. The most widely accepted definition comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who helped popularize the concept in the English-speaking world. According to Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness is the practice of paying attention to the present moment in a nonjudgmental way. It’s about being aware of your thoughts and surroundings, with your attention on what’s happening right now. Mindfulness holds no judgments of bad or good, no considerations of what’s happened in the past or will happen in the future, simply observing matters as they arise.

Although many dogs are treated as family members and receive a good deal of attention and interaction, other pet dogs are treated more like ornaments or decorations—they are near their owner much of the time, but they receive little focused attention. These researchers thought that the first group of dogs was being treated mindfully and thus might provide psychological benefits; the other group, which received little attention, might not improve their owners’ well-being.

The Current Study

To test these ideas, the investigators used 52 dog owners and their pet dogs. Each of these was tested under two conditions: the mindful (full attention) condition and the control condition, in counterbalanced order. Each of these test conditions involved a set of four different exercises.

In the mindfulness condition, participants “were encouraged to observe, interact, smell, and touch their dog, while paying attention to all the sensations and emotions present.” This included a five-minute session of playing with the dog, and another five minutes of sitting quietly while attending to the dog. The essence was to direct the owners’ attention so that the focus was on the dog.

The dog was also in the test room during the control session and was allowed to do whatever it pleased; meanwhile, the owner worked on the computer, watched a video, answered questions, played a memory game, and similar activities that did not involve the dog.

The activities of both the dog and the owner were videotaped, and later interactions were coded and scored. After both the mindfulness and the control conditions, the dog owners answered a questionnaire that included items to measure their emotional state and current feelings.

Does Mindful Attention to the Dog Make a Difference?

The videos and questionnaires provided a lot of data, and the investigators analyzed these extensively. However, for our purposes, the important question involved changes in the owner’s emotional well-being. Here, the results were quite unambiguous.

For the complex of positive emotions measured, the scores were more than twice as high in the mindfulness condition than in the control condition. Similar helpful effects were found for emotions associated with happiness (eudamonic emotions), joy, and contentment.

The researchers summarize their findings about the emotional changes which resulted from paying mindful attention to a pet dog by saying “These findings confirm that a situation where mindfulness in the presence of one’s dog is experimentally induced and promoted yields higher well-being compared to a situation where one’s dog is present, but no interactions are encouraged between the owner and their dog. Such evidence provides support for the idea that the very nature of human-dog relationships, and what takes place within these interactions, is important to understanding and predicting human wellness.”

My dog has been patiently lying beside me while I have been working on this post. I am currently feeling fatigued and mumphy; based on these results, I am now going to pay some attention to him in the hopes of getting a positive emotional boost from him. You might try doing so with your dog. It costs nothing and takes little effort, and if this research is correct, it might improve your emotional well-being.

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