Petting therapy dogs can reduce anxiety, enhance thinking skills in stressed students
Washington: Pet your stress away! For college students under pressure, spending time petting a therapy dog can work as the best stress buster. The study was published in AERA Open, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.
According to the new Washington State University research, programs exclusively focused on petting therapy dogs improved stressed-out students' thinking and planning skills more effectively than programs that included traditional stress-management information.
The study demonstrated that stressed students still exhibited these cognitive skills improvements up to six weeks after completion of the four-week-long program.