Cuddling cats during stressful moments may not reduce anxiety and could intensify negative emotions, a study has revealed.
A team from The Open University of the Netherlands in Heerlen investigated the nuances and underlying mechanisms behind the influence of pets on their owners’ emotional well-being.
Participants received 10 app notifications a day for five days, prompting them to complete a questionnaire about how they felt, what they were doing, and whether they were around and interacting with their pets.
The study allowed researchers to examine interactions between pets and their owners as they happened, rather than relying on people’s memories.
While the study found that interacting with pets usually helped owners’ emotions, the team discovered that if owners interacted with their pets when under stress, it did not protect against its negative effects on mood.
Positive effects of pets ‘appear genuine’
Dr Mayke Janssens, an assistant professor of psychology at the university, said: “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.
“Interacting more intensively with the companion animal did not provide additional emotional benefits beyond those that may arise from the animal simply being present.”
The researchers also found that when people who were stressed interacted with their cats, they experienced more intense negative feelings.
Dr Sanne Peeters, a researcher for the study, said this could be because cats were “often more passive and less demanding in nature”. She said: “A higher level of interaction might be more emotionally evocative. This might not match the need for support in stressful moments.”
Among owners of dogs, pet-owner interactions neither intensified nor improved the negative emotions owners felt in stressful situations. The researchers said there was no definitive explanation and their findings should be interpreted with caution.
They pointed out that the number of cat owners in the study was smaller than the dog-owner sample, and the association between cats and stressed owners was not consistently observed.
Dr Peeters also stressed the results did not mean one species was a better pet than the other. She said: “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.”
Overall, the results showed that interacting with pets resulted in more positive feelings among owners, and that in moments during which interaction levels were higher, people experienced more positive and fewer negative feelings. These findings were the same for dog and cat owners.