The deadline is looming. The washing machine breaks. The kids are bickering. And the toast just burned. What do you do? Reach for the cat, of course.
After all, nothing says ‘emotional support’ quite like an animal that can sleep for 16 hours a day, demand food immediately after eating and look personally offended when you move its favourite cushion.
But surely a cuddle can’t make things worse. Can it?
To find out what happens to our emotions when we interact with pets, researchers recruited 188 dog and cat owners and followed them through their everyday lives.
For five days, participants received prompts at random points through the day, asking how they were feeling, what they were doing and whether they were interacting with their pets.
This generated thousands of data points and enabled the researchers to capture people’s emotional ups and downs as they happened.
When people were interacting with their pet in the moment, they tended to feel better. Participants reported more positive feelings and fewer negative feelings. This was true for cat and dog owners.
So far, so good. Next, the team investigated how pets affect our experience of stress. Perhaps surprisingly, they found that interacting with pets didn’t make stressful moments less stressful.
“The positive effects of pet interaction on wellbeing appear to be genuine,” says Mayke Janssens from the Open University of The Netherlands, “but they don’t seem to happen because pets help people handle stress better at the exact moment the stress occurs.”
In other words, pets seem to make us feel better, but not by taking the edge off stressful experiences.
The researchers suggest that companionship and a sense of connection might explain some of the benefits instead.
But when the researchers looked at cats and dogs separately, things got more interesting. The two species didn’t have quite the same effect on their owners’ emotions during stressful moments.
For dog owners, interacting with their pet didn’t seem to change the way stress affected their mood. There was no evidence that dogs made stressful moments better or worse.
Cats, however, were a different story. When people interacted with their cats during stressful moments, they experienced more negative feelings.
This suggests that cuddling your cat when you’re stressed may not be the soothing solution you think it is. It could even make things worse.
Why might this be? One possibility is that cat interactions are often quite passive. A cat may simply sit beside you or permit you to scratch its head.
Dogs, on the other hand, tend to require more active engagement: a game of fetch, some fuss, perhaps a walk to investigate every lamppost in the neighbourhood.
When we’re stressed, a more intensive interaction with a cat might therefore be an emotional mismatch for our needs at that moment.
Of course, I don’t need science to tell me this. If I so much as look at my cat when I’m feeling stressed, she ups the aloof quotient and heads for the nearest box to sit in.
Apparently, emotional support is only available by appointment.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Alex Daly, Lancashire) 'Cats v dogs: who's better when I'm stressed?'
To submit your questions, email us at questions@sciencefocus.com, or message our Facebook, X, or Instagram pages (don't forget to include your name and location).
Check out our ultimate fun facts page for more mind-blowing science
Read more:
