Health Psychology: Animal-Assisted Therapy (AAT)

Health Psychology is a growing field which covers many different areas including how to get healthy, how to stay healthy, and how to better deal with stress and stressful situation. One very interesting topic of Health Psychology is Animal-Assisted Therapy (AAT). AAT is a specific type of therapy where the patient is introduced to a highly trained animal, typically dogs. AAT has been found to support mental health and quality of life for patients choosing to undergo therapy with the animal. During a therapy session with the AAT dogs, the handler is present and the patient will groom, pet, or talk to the animal causing them to feel more comfortable in the situation. Current research involving AAT is very specific to age, allowing for the question,

The experimenters performed the study to evaluate whether AAT would be of assistance to children who were going through therapy for sexual abuse. The researchers expected to find that therapy sessions with the dogs would help lower the trauma symptoms in the children. The study included 153 children who had experienced child sexual assault and had been taken to a Child Advocacy Center (CAC). The participants were between the ages 7 and 17. In the experiment, researchers used three groups, a no dog group, a dog with no story group, and a dog with story group. In the no dog group, a dog was available in the lobby but not in the therapy session to act as a control group during 12 therapy sessions. The dog with no story group got to see and interact with the dog outside of the therapy session for 30 minutes, like the no dog group, but in this case the dog joined the therapy session for 10 to 15 minutes. In the dog with story group, the dog was allowed in the group therapy session the whole time. The researchers made scripts for the handlers to a story tell through the perspective of the dog, and they also made questions to be asked after the dog’s speech was over to make an easy break into talking to the children about their experiences. The experimenter used the Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children (TSCC) to look at how much trauma the participants had experienced on a clinical scale

The researcher expected to find that AAT would help lower all of the signs previously stated. To test this hypothesis, they used 65 nursing home residences and randomly assigned them to the treatment as usual group or the treatment as usual combined with AAT group. The experiment lasted a couple of months and consisted of 10 weekly sessions. To test their variables, the researchers compared the participant’s pre and posttest borderlines for depression, aggression, and dementia. Results showed promise in AAT. The researchers stated that AAT may delay progression of neuropsychiatric symptoms like depression and anxiety in demented nursing home residents. The researchers stated that the main problem with their research was that there was no control group so that the researchers could be sure that the change in borderline was due to AAT specifically and not some external factor. This experiment is another example of how AAT is effective in reducing stress levels in a stressful situation, in this case a nursing home. In the first two articles mentioned, stress levels are examined in children, and in the last two articles, stress levels are examined in older adults. The children in the studies were suffering from chronic or acute illnesses or had experienced sexual abuse and were