The emotional benefit of having a pet doesn’t come from whether you own a cat or a dog, but hinges on the type of bond you have with your companion, researchers have found.
The team’s initial focus was to better understand the nuances of how having a pet affects owners’ emotional well-being, while also examining whether the benefits of pet ownership vary depending on whether you have a cat or a dog, particularly in stress management.
Led by researchers from the Open University in the Netherlands, the peer-reviewed study published in Frontiers in Psychology also included researchers from Maastricht University Medical Center and the University of Basel in Switzerland.
“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 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.”
For the study, pet owners were asked to answer a questionnaire 10 times a day for five days straight about their well-being and if they were currently with their pets.
In total, the study generated almost 8,000 real-time data reports for researchers to gain a better understanding of how pets can influence emotions in a day-to-day context.
Pets can incite positive feelings in owners, mainly when the owners are already happy
Overall, the results showed that interacting with a pet could lead to positive emotions, and the more an owner interacted with their pet, the more positive feelings they experienced than negative ones. The results were the same regardless of whether the pet was a dog or a cat.
“Dog owners were probably more likely to identify as ‘dog people,’ whereas cat owners were more likely to identify as ‘cat people,’” said Dr. Sanne Peeters, a researcher at The Open University.
“It’s possible that this owner-pet ‘match’ partly explains why the findings were so similar for dogs and cats.”
The team also investigated whether interaction with a pet could decrease stress and negative emotions more than just being near one. However, the study showed that this was not the case, and interacting with your pet does 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. 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.”
No significant difference in emotions when pet is a dog or cat, as long as bond is there
Most notably, researchers found that when a stressed cat owner interacted with their pet, they actually experienced 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.
However, the findings were not definitive, as the cat sample of the study was smaller than the dog sample, and the association between cats and stressed owners could not be consistently observed.
Additionally, dog owners did not necessarily see improvements to emotions while interacting with pets; they just didn’t get worse.
“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.”