The social support theory contends that companionship and social support, both of which are essential for wellbeing, can be found in animals. The social impact of dogs on people is particularly important for those who are more likely to be socially isolated, such as elderly people and youngsters without siblings.
Why are dogs so special to people?
Science has your back if you consider your dog to be your “fur baby.” According to recent studies, when our canine friends look into our eyes, they trigger the same hormonal reaction that makes us bond with human infants. The study—which is the first to demonstrate this hormone bonding effect between humans and another species—might contribute to the understanding of why dogs initially became our companions so long ago.
According to Brian Hare, a canine cognition specialist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the research, “It’s an astounding finding that implies that dogs have hijacked the human bonding system.” According to Hare, the finding could help explain why assistance dogs are so beneficial for persons with autism and post-traumatic stress disorder. Given its potentially wide-ranging ramifications, a result of this scale has to be reproduced.
Dogs are already well known for their propensity to engage in human interaction. Dogs appear to comprehend humans in a manner that no other animal can, and it’s not simply because they enjoy going on walks and catching Frisbees. Dogs have an instinctive understanding of our intentions—”I’m trying to teach you something,” for instance—that baffles even chimps, our closest living cousins. When interacting, both people and dogs also glance into each other’s eyes. Wolves, the closest living relatives of dogs, take this as a sign of hostility.
Takefumi Kikusui, an animal behaviorist at Azabu University in Sagamihara, Japan, was intrigued by this shared gaze. The oxytocin hormone, which affects maternal attachment, trust, and altruism, is the subject of research at Kikusui’s group. Other studies have demonstrated that when a mother looks into her baby’s eyes, the infant’s oxytocin levels rise. This drives the child to look back into its mother’s eyes, which prompts the mother to release more oxytocin. When the baby is unable to express itself in other ways, this positive feedback loop appears to build a strong emotional relationship between mother and kid.
Having owned a dog for over 15 years, Kikusuia questioned if the same applied to dogs. I always feel like my dogs are more of a buddy than a pet, he says, adding that he loves his pets. “So I began to question, “Why are they so near humans?” Why are they so closely tied to us?”
30 of their friends and neighbors were persuaded by Kikusui and his colleagues to bring their pets into his experiment. They discovered a few people who were keeping wolves as pets and got in touch with them. The researchers allowed the owners to interact with their animals in a room together for 30 minutes after collecting urine from both animals when each owner brought their pet into the lab. The owners would frequently chat to and pet their pets during this period. Dogs and their owners were also sharing eye contact, some for a few seconds, others for several minutes. Unsurprisingly, the wolves didn’t make much eye contact with their owners. The crew collected further urine samples after the allotted period was gone.
Mutual eye contact had a significant impact on the dogs’ owners as well. Both male and female canines and both male and female owners showed a 300% increase in oxytocin levels in the pairs that had spent the most time looking into each other’s eyes. (Kikusui took part in the experiment with his two standard poodles, Anita and Jasmine, and was one of them.) No wolf-owner pairs or canines and owners that had spent little time looking at each other showed an increase in oxytocin, according to the researchers.
The same fundamental steps were followed in a subsequent experiment, but this time the dogs were first given an oxytocin nasal spray before interacting with their owners. This time, there were no wolves either. Giving a nasal spray to a wolf would be extremely risky, Kikusui laughs. Female dogs given the nasal spray spent 150% more time looking into their owners’ eyes, which caused their oxytocin levels to increase by 300%. Male dogs or dogs given a nasal spray that solely included saline did not experience any effects.
The team published their findings online in Science today. The findings indicate that human-dog interactions trigger the same kind of oxytocin positive feedback loop as interactions between mothers and their young. And that could also help to explain why we have such a strong bond with our pets and vice versa. According to Kikusui, it’s possible that the nasal spray only had an impact on female canines because oxytocin plays a bigger part in female reproduction and is crucial for labor and nursing.
According to him, the domestication of dogs may have benefited greatly from this positive feedback loop. Only those wolves who could form bonds with humans would have been cared for and protected as they changed from wolves to dogs. Additionally, it’s possible that humans themselves have evolved the capacity to reciprocate, adapting the feedback loop of mother bonding to a new species. The adaptation may have been crucial for human survival as well since oxytocin reduces anxiety, claims Kikusui, who calls it “our biggest speculation.” “It’s better for people’s health if they are less stressed out.”
Jessica Oliva, a Ph.D. student at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, whose recent research demonstrated that the hormone improves dogs’ comprehension of human pointing, adds, “I definitely think oxytocin was involved in domestication.” The majority of these canines likely link the action with food and play, both of which can raise oxytocin levels; still, she notes that mutual gazing doesn’t occur in a vacuum. So even while we may think of our dogs as our children, that doesn’t mean that they do, too. We might just be hip pals who occasionally give them a massage.
Can a dog become too connected to you?
Your friends call you on Saturday night to go out. They might wish to stop by a party or a live performance by a nearby band. But in all honesty, you’d prefer to play with your cat at home.
Your pals claim that you care too much for that cat. Might they be correct? Can you possibly love your pet too much, in other words?
The response: It is possible to develop harmful attachments to animals, but this requires a rather strong attachment. The answer is most likely no in the small case mentioned above. Many people would prefer a calm evening at home with kitten, who would undoubtedly love the companionship, rather than spending the evening in a noisy, smoky pub.
However, there can be an issue if your relationship with your pet prevents you from having fulfilling human relationships. According to counselor Marty Tousley, RN, MS, CS, “When people lose objectivity, they might develop harmful connections. ” However, it depends on the specific circumstance.
Tousley points out that when we expect our dogs to stand in for people, our human-animal bonds become unhealthy. Although the ties we have with our pets are lovely and gratifying, they shouldn’t take the place of our desire to be with other people.
Tousley cites the example of a woman who has experienced failed romantic relationships with males, possibly even one or two failed marriages, in an article she wrote. “A woman might discover that focusing her relationship with a pet, who is never critical or demanding and wouldn’t ever make her feel rejected or abandoned, is safer, simpler, and more emotionally rewarding. According to Tousley, she would essentially be hiding her own anxieties about commitment and intimacy with men by using her cat as a front.
She provides six ideas a therapist might take into account:
- how much you let your pet impose on your regular activities.
- Whether or whether your pet has negatively impacted critical relationships (spouse, close friends or relatives). Finding someone who shares your hobbies and priorities is different from simply wanting to date someone who likes your cat or dog.
- if you prioritize your relationship with your pet over your connections to family and friends.
- Whether you typically decline invitations if your pet is not welcome.
- If you are preoccupied with your pet and neglect other issues the majority of the time (such as your own health).
- if you think your pet is something you cannot live without.
Because most of us will outlive our pet companions, this final factor is crucial. When a pet passes away, a codependent person could experience crippling depression.
Is developing an emotional bond with your dog normal?
The bond we develop to non-humans is unlike any other relationship that humans have. Many of us currently or in the past have lived with animals. Currently, 39% of American households have at least one dog, and 33% have at least one cat, according to the American Humane Society.
Social psychologists contend that because pets are readily available, energetic, and friendly, they are natural objects of human attachment. Pets are “the ideal attachment figures,” according to Paula Pietromonaco, a colleague and attachment researcher at UMass. Therefore, it makes logical to investigate our feelings toward these ready and willing attachment figures using the same techniques we do to shed light on the makeup of interpersonal relationships.
In a recent informal survey, a group of social psychologists selected attachment theory as the most significant psychological theory. The attachment viewpoint, which is a subset of psychodynamic theory, asserts that people differ in how they relate to the important persons in their lives. With the people in our lives who are currently in the spotlight, we recreate the relationships we had with our caregivers when we were infants as adults. Researchers studying attachment theory use questionnaires to assess what they refer to as “attachment style” or “attachment orientation,” in which they look at the patterns of feelings, behaviors, and expectations about relationships that people create over the course of their relationships. Attachment style develops around what psychologists refer to as the internal working model, or how you perceive the significant people in your life.
Our interactions with these internal working models clearly reflect our attachment preferences. When we have anxiety about these models, we strive to be as close to our partners as we can out of concern that they won’t be there for us when we need them. When we have high levels of avoidant anxiety, we distrust our companions and work to maintain our independence. In contrast to popular belief, attachment style is more of an orientation and can vary depending on the attachment object. Your particular stance on the two attachment dimensions may vary depending on the kinds of relationships you have, including those with family, friends, and romantic partners.
What can you learn about connection to the non-humans in your life by using this background information? The “Pet Attachment Questionnaire” was put to the test in a series of investigations by researchers Zilcha-Mano, Mikulincer, and Shaver (2011a) in Israel. They polled current and former pet owners in locations like malls, pet food stores, universities, and parks; roughly 75 percent had dogs and the remaining 30 percent had cats.
Zilcha-Mano and associates looked at the connections between the Five-Factor personality traits and the two attachment dimensions in one study. As one might anticipate, those who scored highly on the attribute of neuroticism also tended to score highly on attachment anxiety. Extraverted people were less likely to develop an avoidant relationship to their pets.
The researchers then investigated whether people would match their attachment orientation in human relationships to that they had with their pets or whether they would make up for bad human connections by developing stronger attachment bonds with their pets. The “compensation” idea was defeated by the “matching” hypothesis. People’s internal mental models of their interactions with other people do align with their interactions with their pets. People who are uneasy with their relationships with others are similarly uneasy with their relationships with animals. Nevertheless, regardless of their attachment to humans, persons with insecure pet attachments had worse mental health. Pet bond appears to be crucial for general mental wellness.
Since animals live considerably shorter lives than people do, it makes sense to wonder how those who have an anxious and avoidant relationship to their pets would feel if their animal passed away. The death of a pet can strike deeply at the core of a person’s emotions, similar to connection to humans. The research team observed that those with high levels of anxiety exhibited intense emotional reactions; those with high levels of pet avoidance attachment were less upset when their pets passed away and displayed less craving for their pets. Conversely, those with higher levels of attachment anxiety displayed more persistent, unresolved sadness. Surprisingly, the only factor that could account for these responses was attachment to pets—not the participants’ attachment patterns toward other people. It is obvious that our attachment to our pets is a significant aspect of our psychological well-being in and of itself.
Why do I care about my dog so much?
There’s no feeling like gazing adoringly at your pet and getting a loving stare right back, whether it’s during a run through the park or after giving them a treat.
Dog lovers already know that the affection is reciprocal (and very real), but a recent study in the journal Science uncovers the fascinating explanation for why we feel so connected to our canine friends: The feel-good hormone oxytocin, which is responsible for the unique link between new parents and their children, is released when people and canines stare into each other’s eyes.
30 canine and human pairings were asked to enter a lab to exchange glances and provide urine samples in order for the researchers to arrive at their conclusions. The levels of oxytocin in the human and animal samples were then assessed. In the end, oxytocin levels in both canines and owners—regardless of gender—rose by 130 percent and 300 percent, respectively.
Do dogs believe humans to be their parents?
- It is possible for a puppy and a human to form a mother-like bond.
- Dogs can detect human facial expressions and have a highly developed sense of smell that aids in human identification.
- A dog’s choices are influenced by positive reinforcement and socialization with both humans and other dogs.
Many think that socialization rather than biology has a larger role in a healthy puppy-parent bond. Therefore, a puppy can absolutely view you as his “mother,” that is, his provider and protector, and form an emotional connection with you that is just as strong as if you were related to him by blood.
Your puppy will also pick you out of a crowd of strangers with ease using both his keen eye and nose. However, it takes some care to establish positive relationships and make sure your dog sees you as his devoted pet parent.
