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A new study published in PLOS One looked at depression, anxiety, and happiness in dog owners and potential dog owners during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

“Our study is about the role dogs may have played on owners’ psychological wellbeing when most of the USA was under lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” study author Francois Martin told us. “We wanted to know if dog owners would show less signs of depression and anxiety, and if they would report a greater sense of wellbeing.”

The work the researchers did was based on two main assumptions. The first one was that the more social support people have, the better they are able to cope with a difficult situation such as a divorce, the loss of a job, or in our case the impact of the pandemic on their lives because of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic. The second assumption they made was that dogs provide social support. Researchers predicted that dog owners would fare better than non-dog owners during this period.

“As a scientist who has been studying the relationship between pets and people for more than 25 years, the pandemic offered a unique opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of why pets are so important to so many people,” Martin told us. “We conducted a national survey where we compared a group of dog owners to a group of people who did not have dogs.”

The two groups were very similar to each other in terms of male to female ratio, incomes, education, where they lived, the number of people in the household, race and ethnicity. They also controlled for the level of social support they reported having access to. The main difference was their dog ownership status. Researchers asked them to complete psychometric tests on depression, anxiety, and happiness. They also asked them to complete test on pet attachment and commitment.

“We found that dog owners were more attached and committed to pets than non-dog owners,” Martin told us. “They also reported having more social support available to them. Their depression scores were also lower than those of non-dog owners. This difference was small, but statistically significant. There were no differences in anxiety and happiness scores between the two groups.”

Overall, the results went according to our initial predictions, explained Martin. It seems like dogs may have indeed provided some social support to people during this difficult time and this support may have helped dog owners cope better.  

One of the findings of the research was that the respondents who reported having low social support available to them were affected by the pandemic a lot more than people who reported moderate to high social support. This was true for both the dog owners and the non-dog owners. 

“It would be interesting to see if the presence of a dog would have a greater effect for these people,” Martin told us. “Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for the respondents, very few people in our survey fell in this category and this prevented us from testing this idea. I see this as a potential next step in the study of human-pet relationship.”