Petting a Dog Dampened the Next Stress Test, Not the First Recovery, in a 64-Owner Lab Study
An Innsbruck study found no faster recovery from touch, but a smaller bodily reaction to a second stressor. The effect came from an exploratory analysis, and a daily-life study found no stress buffer.
By Sana Whitfield, Culture, Science & Life
· 4 min read · Updated
Key Takeaways
- •In a 64-owner lab study in Biological Psychology, touching a dog did not speed recovery from a stress test, contrary to the team's prediction.
- •Owners who recovered with touch showed a smaller brain and heart reaction to a second stress test; owners who recovered without touch showed no significant change.
- •The second-test result came from an exploratory analysis, 80 percent of participants were women, and all were White European adults tested with their own dogs.
- •A separate Open University study with almost 8,000 daily-life reports found pet interaction improved mood but did not buffer stress.
Picture a dog owner in a lab in Innsbruck, Austria, wearing a 64-sensor EEG cap and forearm heart monitors. She is answering rapid-fire general-knowledge questions, counting backward toward a flashing red dot, and hearing critical feedback about her performance over a video call. Then her dog walks in.
Sixty-four owners went through a version of that for a study in Biological Psychology from Annett Schirmer's Brain and Behavior Lab at the University of Innsbruck. In one session the dog roamed freely during recovery. In the other it sat on a short leash out of reach, though owners could still talk to it and make eye contact. The team had predicted that touch would speed recovery. It did not. Brain waves, heart rate and mood drifted back toward baseline at similar rates either way.
The short answer
In a lab study of 64 dog owners, petting a dog did not help people recover faster from a stress test. It did coincide with a smaller bodily reaction to a second stress test: less drop in relaxed brain waves, a slower heart rate and higher heart-rate variability. Being near the dog, talking and making eye contact did not. That second-test result came from an exploratory analysis.
What happened in the second round
Owners in the touch condition stroked their dogs, mostly on the fur, for about 64 percent of the recovery period, roughly 3 minutes and 12 seconds. Owners in the no-touch condition made more than 53 extra seconds of eye contact instead, according to PsyPost's account of the paper.
The payoff showed up when everyone sat the stress test a second time. People who had recovered with touch in the first block showed less suppression of alpha waves, a marker of relaxation. Their heart rates were slower and their heart-rate variability higher than in their own first test. PsyPost reports standardized effect sizes of about 0.36 for alpha, 0.40 for variability and 0.72 for heart rate, which are moderate. People who recovered without touch first showed no statistically significant changes in those measures.
Asked how they felt, the two groups did not differ in reported stress. The authors note that the body may be buffered without the person noticing. In the paper's own words, "touch appears to be an important aspect of human-pet interactions."
Where the claim runs thin
The second-test effect was not the preregistered prediction. It came from an exploratory analysis that the team says needs direct confirmation. Differences in how hard people worked during the second test could not be fully ruled out. A respiration-linked measure of heart-rate variability did not reproduce the main touch effect.
The sample matters too. About 80 percent of participants were women, all were White European adults, and each person brought their own dog into a lab. One more limit: "significant in one group, not in the other" is not a direct test that the groups differ. The sources I could reach describe the results the first way.
PsyPost quotes the study team saying the findings "provide causal evidence for a stress-buffering effect of touch under controlled laboratory conditions." It also quotes them adding that physical contact "should always be mutually wanted and positive."
A different study found no buffer in daily life
A separate team at The Open University in the Netherlands studied pet owners outside a lab. Participants got 10 app notifications a day for five days asking how they felt and whether they were interacting with a pet. News-Medical's summary of the Frontiers in Psychology paper counts almost 8,000 real-time reports.
Interacting with a pet went along with better moods for dog and cat owners alike. It did not blunt the effect of stress on mood. Mayke Janssens, an assistant professor of psychology, is the paper's corresponding author. She said the benefits "appear to be genuine," but do not seem to arise because pets help people handle stress better "at the exact moment the stress occurs." Among stressed cat owners, more interaction went with stronger negative feelings.
The two studies measured different things. One tracked moment-to-moment mood in ordinary life, the other tracked brain and heart signals after a staged stressor. They agree on one point: neither found that a pet in the room lifted self-reported stress on the spot. What Innsbruck adds is a narrow, tentative hint that touch may change the next hard moment more than the current one. It comes from a small, mostly female, entirely White European sample, and the team itself says the finding needs confirmation.
- dogs
- pets
- stress
- touch
- Biological Psychology
- University of Innsbruck
- wellbeing
Sources
- 01Pet-induced stress buffering depends on touch: Evidence from brain and cardiac measures, Biological Psychology (Elsevier)doi.org
- 02New study suggests touch is a key ingredient in dogs' stress-buffering power, PsyPostpsypost.org
- 03Pet interactions improve mood but do not buffer daily stress, News-Medicalnews-medical.net
Corrections
No corrections have been made to this article.
About the reporter
Culture, Science & Life Reporter, Trestlewire
I started out writing about science — real lab-coat, peer-reviewed, methods-section science — and I moved into culture coverage because I kept noticing that the internet, not the lab, is often where science actually plays out in people's daily lives now. A study on sleep or attention or habit formation used to sit in a journal for a decade before anyone outside the field read it. Now it shows up in a group chat by Thursday, usually stripped of every caveat that made it interesting in the first place.
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