How Therapy Dogs Came to Exist
Interesting information about our four-footed counselors and the usefulness of using dogs to relieve stress or to assist in therapeutic interventions, and how this practice has come to be accepted by mainstream psychological, educational and medical practitioners.
"It was quite early in my career, in the 1960’s, and I was attending the American Psychological Association meetings in New York. Because of my interest in dogs and their relationship to humans, I was caught by the title of a talk to be given by a child psychologist, Boris Levinson, who was at Yeshiva University. This would turn out to be the first formal presentation of animal assisted therapy given before a national audience in North America. Levinson was working with a very disturbed child and found, by chance, that when he had his dog Jingles with him the therapy sessions were much more productive. Furthermore, other children who had difficulty communicating seemed more at ease and actually made real attempts at conversation when the dog was present. Levinson gathered data from several such cases and this formed the basis of the paper that he presented at this APA meeting.
…the presence of the dog seemed to help patients during their therapy sessions as well. This difference was most marked when Freud was dealing with children or adolescents. It seemed to him that the patients seemed more willing to talk openly when the dog was in the room. They were also more willing to talk about painful issues. The positive results were not limited only to children, but also were seen in adults…
The ultimate validation of animal assisted therapy would come from psychologist Alan Beck and psychiatrist Aaron Katcher. They used direct physiological measures to show that when a person interacted with, or even was simply in the presence of, a friendly dog, there were immediate changes in their physiological responses. Breathing became more regular, heart beat slowed, muscles relaxed and there were other physiological changes suggesting a lowering of sympathetic nervous system activity. Since it is the sympathetic nervous system which responds to stress, this indicated that the dog was clearly reducing the stress levels of the people in its presence. There is a bias among psychological researchers, in that they tend to use physiological measures as if they are the “gold standard” for the validity of a concept. Since they could now see the direct effects that pets were having on the physiological indexes of stress, the notions associated with animal assisted therapy became much more acceptable."
Excerpts reposted with permission
To read the full article published on February 11, 2013 by Stanley Coren, Ph.D. (a Psychology Professor at the University of British Columbia) in Canine Corner
click on: psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner/201302/how-therapy-dogs-almost-never-came-exist
Interesting information about our four-footed counselors and the usefulness of using dogs to relieve stress or to assist in therapeutic interventions, and how this practice has come to be accepted by mainstream psychological, educational and medical practitioners.
"It was quite early in my career, in the 1960’s, and I was attending the American Psychological Association meetings in New York. Because of my interest in dogs and their relationship to humans, I was caught by the title of a talk to be given by a child psychologist, Boris Levinson, who was at Yeshiva University. This would turn out to be the first formal presentation of animal assisted therapy given before a national audience in North America. Levinson was working with a very disturbed child and found, by chance, that when he had his dog Jingles with him the therapy sessions were much more productive. Furthermore, other children who had difficulty communicating seemed more at ease and actually made real attempts at conversation when the dog was present. Levinson gathered data from several such cases and this formed the basis of the paper that he presented at this APA meeting.
…the presence of the dog seemed to help patients during their therapy sessions as well. This difference was most marked when Freud was dealing with children or adolescents. It seemed to him that the patients seemed more willing to talk openly when the dog was in the room. They were also more willing to talk about painful issues. The positive results were not limited only to children, but also were seen in adults…
The ultimate validation of animal assisted therapy would come from psychologist Alan Beck and psychiatrist Aaron Katcher. They used direct physiological measures to show that when a person interacted with, or even was simply in the presence of, a friendly dog, there were immediate changes in their physiological responses. Breathing became more regular, heart beat slowed, muscles relaxed and there were other physiological changes suggesting a lowering of sympathetic nervous system activity. Since it is the sympathetic nervous system which responds to stress, this indicated that the dog was clearly reducing the stress levels of the people in its presence. There is a bias among psychological researchers, in that they tend to use physiological measures as if they are the “gold standard” for the validity of a concept. Since they could now see the direct effects that pets were having on the physiological indexes of stress, the notions associated with animal assisted therapy became much more acceptable."
Excerpts reposted with permission
To read the full article published on February 11, 2013 by Stanley Coren, Ph.D. (a Psychology Professor at the University of British Columbia) in Canine Corner
click on: psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner/201302/how-therapy-dogs-almost-never-came-exist
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