There is a growing body of evidence revealing the benefits of Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT), where dogs, cats, and sometimes other companion animals are used to help people recover from a variety of illnesses and emotional issues. What began as an intuitive idea – that the presence of animal companions is emotionally calming and relaxing – has grown into a legitimate and well-regarded form of therapy used for a variety of different conditions and for a wide range of people, such as children, the elderly, and soldiers. The use of AAT in mental health situations has “expanded considerably” and there is a growing field of study that validates its usefulness.

However, researchers are concerned that AAT may not be useful in certain settings. This paper looks at one such possibility, where AAT may actually interfere with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Within CBT, it has long been recognized that “emotional arousal is a necessary component of the reduction of maladaptive emotional responses,” meaning that part of the way patients are meant to deal with their emotions is to actively experience them and work through them. From a state of emotional arousal, whether that emotion is fear, anxiety, sadness, or otherwise, the therapist will then “facilitate incorporation of new information related to the distressing stimuli, situation, or memory.” In this type of work, the presence of a therapy dog could actually undermine the process by keeping the patient calm and out of a state of emotional arousal.

To better understand if therapy dogs help or hinder CBT, researchers studied over a hundred people and measured how the presence (or absence) of dogs had an effect on the therapeutic experience through trauma essays written by patients. This study, the first of its kind, found that AAT dogs “may make thinking about difficult, emotionally evocative topics less distressing, and may, in some cases, facilitate positive outcomes.” Specifically, the researchers found that:

Individuals in both of the trauma writing conditions produced comparable essays that were indistinguishable from each other in terms of severity of the trauma discussed, negative emotional expression, or cognitive insight. This was true for analyses based on both the automated LIWC program and for analyses based on qualitative analysis by blind human raters.

In other words, based on the writing alone, it seems that the presence of an AAT dog did not negatively impact therapy, in fact, their effect was positive. While the essays showed no difference in the trauma processing, “there were significant differences in both the subjective experience and, to a lesser extent, in the long-term outcome for those participants, depending on whether or not they got to interact with a dog.” The patients who had AAT dogs with them said that they experienced “significantly less” anxiety, dysphoria, and distress than those that did not. What’s more, the study found that patients with AAT dogs were more likely to report “significant decreases in depressive symptoms from baseline to follow-up,” and that “more introverted participants seemed to benefit the most from having a dog present.”

Though the researchers caution that one study is not enough to draw strong conclusions, and say that more investigations need to be done, these results are certainly encouraging. For advocates, this is yet another paper that adds to the evidence that AAT is beneficial in a variety of ways. Companion animal advocates should continue to be aware of the growth of AAT, and that in many ways it reflects the variety of benefits many of us experience when living with a companion animal.