The Therapeutic Tool That Works Better Than A Stress Management Program – A Dog

Stress management workshops are a widely-used intervention to help people cope with the strains of life, but one therapeutic tool has been found to be much more effective – a dog.

College students who were in danger of dropping out of their course made significant improvements across a range of executive functioning skills after spending as little as an hour a week with a dog.

In contrast, students who took part in traditional stress management approaches – where they are taught coping skills – saw no change.

The findings have implications not just for universities, where therapy animals are now a common sight on campus, but also in the workplace.

“Participation in traditional stress management workshops was less effective for at-risk students than providing interactions with therapy dogs,” said Patricia Pendry, professor in the human development department at Washington State University and lead author of a newly-published study into the use of therapy dogs on campus.

“We expected that teaching students ‘proven’ stress management and coping skills would be especially helpful for students with a history of mental health issues, learning or academic challenges, but found this was not the case.”

Although therapy animals – typically horses, cats, guinea pigs and even fish as well as dogs – are increasingly widely used both on campus and in the workplace, there has been little previous research on who benefits the most and whether they are more effective than traditional approaches to stress management.

The new study, published in AERA Open, the journal of the American Educational Research Association, aimed to examine the effectiveness of therapy dogs on campus and whether that differed between different groups of students.

Students taking part in the research were assigned to one of three groups, each receiving a different intervention for one hour a week over four weeks.

One group spent the whole hour with a therapy dog and its handler. A second group spent half an hour with a dog and half an hour in a stress management workshop, while the third group spent the whole hour in the workshop.

Just over a third of the students taking part – 121 out of 309 – were considered to be at risk of failing their course, based on their previous academic experience, thoughts of suicide, mental health issues or learning difficulties.

Following the interventions, students were assessed across a range of executive functioning skills seen as essential for success in college, including the ability to plan, organize, motivate, concentrate and memorize.

Researchers found that the ‘at risk’ students who spent an hour a week with the dog showed significant improvement in these skills both at the end of the program and six weeks later.

But ‘at risk’ students who spent just half an hour a week with a therapy dog showed no improvement in executive functioning, while ‘typical’ students – those not considered at risk of failing – showed no improvement from any of the three interventions.

“Our findings suggest that engagement with programs that focused on stress management information and activities were not as effective in improving executive functioning for the at-risk population,” said Pendry.

One theory is that focusing on stress in the workshops may have inadvertently increased tension among ‘at risk’ students, impairing their thinking skills, while the therapy dogs provided a distraction from negative thoughts, helping students better control their moods, Pendry said.

“The relaxation itself, rather than the knowledge from the instruction, was most beneficial,” she added.

Although she said more work was needed to replicate the results, the results of the study suggest that a targeted use of therapy animals may be an effective tool for some students.

“While stress management programs play an important role on college campuses and are known to be beneficial for certain populations and specific outcomes, college administrators may consider providing at-risk students with targeted programs emphasizing interaction with therapy animals,” she added.