Companion Animals and Their Impact on Anxiety
People of all ages are positively affected by interacting with pets. The presence of companion animals can be beneficial on social, physical, emotional and cognitive levels. Caring for animals provides an opportunity to learn and exercise responsibility. Human-animal interaction (HAI) reduces stress, gives joy and improves mood.
The act of patting an animal can be helpful in relieving stress. Pets, especially dogs express such enthusiasm when seeing their owner, that the recipients feel happy as well. This can also help us to see ourselves as better people and feel happier about ourselves (if the dog or cat is happy to see us, maybe we are “not so bad at all”). Caring for animals and giving them love give us a sense of happiness that derives from making someone else happy. And it takes so little to provide an animal joy.
HAI provides companionship and reduces loneliness. Companion animals can alternate or enhance human interaction, they can facilitate human interaction by acting as a link between people. Animals help their owners feeling less lonely. This has been observed in people who live alone, children with and without disabilities, youth living rural and the elderly.
Companion animals can bring out positive emotions and allow people to experience a sense of safety, which successively facilitate regulation of both emotional and psychological states. This results in better physical and mental health a greater resilience to stressors.
Companion Animals and Social Support
Social support is most effective when it is two-way and is distinguished by particular social behaviours and bonds, both given and received. Oxytocin is one of elements of the mechanisms that built social bonds. In the process of evolution, mammals gained progressively sophisticated neural and anatomical capacity to generate and receive complex social cues, including acoustic signals. These are basic for human language but also the key to social interaction with other mammals. Prosody (rhythm, pitch, tempo) can be seen in domestic animals. Pets can be mutually sensitive to the kind of sounds made by each other as well as using these signals to determine emotional intention and regulate emotions.
Social bonds can be established in response to severe stressors, particularly when survival relies upon the presence of another individual. Under severe stress, oxytocin is released, leading to development of social bonds. Social support and engagement with following sense of safety is important for mental health in highly social species, such as humans, dogs and cats. Chronic social isolation is linked to increased anxiety, depression and physiological arousal.
How Pets Impact Our Wellbeing?
Wellbeing is more than the absence of stress and illness. People who experience social support are more resilient to stressors and illnesses and live longer than those who feel lonely or isolated.
The ability to socially engage, giving and receiving significant levels of social behaviour is particularly relevant to HAI. Humans can experience a comparable sense of emotional safety with companion animals, as they do with their human companions. Actually, the affection of a pet seems to be unconditional and less complex in comparison to that of human companions.
The benefits of HAI may be recognised when facing stress, challenges of trauma, separation from or death of a loved one, bereavement and emotional loss.
Animal assisted therapies (AATs) most often use dogs, cats, horses or birds. Amid the frequently measured physiological changes are reduction in blood pressure, heart rate and cortisol. These changes are most obvious in individuals who experience chronic illnesses or stressors, however, they also appear in healthy humans. Benefits of HAI have been shown in cancers, dementia, cardiovascular diseases and mental illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia and autism.
