Animal Assisted Activities: An Experimental Comparison Study of Therapy Dogs versus Massages to Alleviate Short-Term Stress

Animal assisted activities and therapy have demonstrated efficacy but the question remains of whether the animals themselves are the mechanism of change or if other factors mediate this relationship. We investigated novelty and touch as mediators between therapy dogs and stress reduction as no other study has done both. Additionally, we were interested in whether the belief that a treatment is relaxing or simply providing a break acted as mediators. We explored these relationships using three conditions: therapy dog interaction, massage, and no-treatment control. Interacting with a therapy dog is similar to receiving a massage in each of the mediators of interest. Thus, should the therapy dogs outperform the massage in relieving stress, it suggests something there is something unique about the dogs themselves, beyond the mediators held constant for both the therapy dog and massage condition. We included the no-treatment control to determine whether treatment at all was effective in reducing stress. We tested 40 participants aged 18 to 43 years old over the course of three days. Participants were measured pre-treatment using two self-report surveys of stress, the Stress Overload Scale- Short (SOS-S) and the Stress Appraisal Measure (SAM) as well as a physiological indicator of stress, heart rate variability (HRV) measured by the Scosche Rhythm24 Waterproof Armband Heart Rate Monitor. Participants were randomly assigned to a condition for seven minutes. Afterwards, all measures were readministered. We found no significant interaction of time on condition nor any main effect of condition on any of the measures. However, we found significant main effects of time on both subscales of the SOS-S and the threat, centrality, controllable-by-others, and stressfulness subscales of the SAM. We are unable to determine whether there is a unique benefit of therapy dogs themselves but overall, the event was effective in reducing stress as reported by the participants. We recommend continued investigation of mediators in animal assisted activities and therapy.