News release

From: Frontiers

Cuddling cats might make us feel worse when under stress

Researchers find more interaction with pets during stressful moments may not help stress-reduction but – in some cases – intensify negative feelings

Can pets ‘shield’ their owners from the negative impacts of stress? A new study found the mechanism underlying pet-owner interactions may have nothing to do with how well pets help people handle stress at the time it occurs. At the same time, more interaction with pets did not equal more stress-relief – and in interactions between cats and their owners more interaction may even cause people to experience negative feelings more intensely. The researchers said these findings support the idea of multiple mechanisms underlying different effects of human-animal interaction in different contexts.

Researchers just got one step closer to solving the age-old question: whether cats or dogs make better pets. A team in the Netherlands set out to better understand the nuances and underlying mechanisms behind the positive influence of pet ownership on owners’ emotional well-being. They also examined if the beneficial influence of pet interaction is specific to either species and found tentative evidence of a difference in how interacting with cats and dogs affects stressed owners. They published their findings in Frontiers in Psychology.

“Our findings indicate that stress-buffering is not the mechanism causing momentary emotional well-being when interacting with a pet. Interaction with either species did not act as a buffer for negative emotions,” said corresponding author Dr Mayke Janssens, an assistant professor of psychology at The Open University. “In cats, we even observed that a higher level of interaction was associated with a stronger link between stress and negative emotions in owners.”

Each to their own pet

After registering for the study, participants received 10 app notifications per day over five consecutive days that prompted them to complete a questionnaire about how they currently felt, what they were doing, and if they were around and interacting with their pets. These almost 8,000 real-time data reports provided a moment-to-moment database of pet-owner interactions which can help gain a more fine-grained understanding of how companion animals may influence people emotionally in everyday contexts, the team said.

The results showed that, in general, interacting with pets resulted in positive owner emotions, and that in moments during which interaction levels were higher, people experienced more positive and less negative feelings. These findings were the same for dog and cat owners.

“Dog owners were probably more likely to identify as ‘dog people,’ whereas cat owners were more likely to identify as ‘cat people,’” first author Dr Sanne Peeters, a researcher at The Open University, pointed out. “It’s possible that this owner-pet ‘match’ partly explains why the findings were so similar for dogs and cats.”

Stress busters?

Next, the team investigated whether interacting with a pet can decrease the negative impact of stress more than simply being in the presence of one. They found that if owners interacted with their pets when stressed, it did not protect against the negative effects of stress on mood.

“The positive effects of pet interaction on well-being appear to be genuine, but they don’t seem to happen because pets help people handle stress better at the exact moment the stress occurs,” Janssens said. “Interacting more intensively with the companion animal did not provide additional emotional benefits beyond those that may arise from the animal simply being present.”

This indicates that a mechanism other than stress buffering – an effect that mitigates the negative impact of stress – might be responsible for the beneficial effect of pet interaction. The exact mechanism has not yet been identified as it may differ between contexts in which humans and animals interact.

“It could be that interacting with a pet provides a sense of companionship and that pets help people feel more connected and less alone, which in turn could contribute to improved emotional well-being,” said Janssens.

Cat vs dog

One surprising, species-specific effect emerged. If stressed cat owners interacted with their cats, the interaction did not help lessen their negative emotions – on the contrary: it made owners experience more intense negative feelings.

“One speculative explanation is that because interactions with cats are often more passive and less demanding in nature, a higher level of interaction might be more emotionally evocative. This might not match the need for support in stressful moments,” Peeters pointed out.

There is no definitive explanation to date and the team said that their findings should be interpreted with caution. The cat owner sample in the study was small – smaller than the dog owner sample – and the association between cats and stressed owners wasn’t consistently observed across analyses.

Among dog owners, pet-owner interactions did not intensify the negative emotions owners felt in stressful situations – although they did not improve them either.

But does this mean that some pets are better than others?

“I wouldn’t say that one species makes a ‘better’ pet than the other,” concluded Peeters. “Instead, it’s more likely about owner personality and preference. The main conclusion is that interacting with dogs and cats appears to provide similar emotional benefits.”