TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — If you’re someone who has pets you’ve probably had some really animated conversations with them. University of Arizona researchers are working on quantifying those kinds of conversations and trying to figure out why they make you feel better.
Sometimes your communication with your pet can be much deeper than where the next treat is coming from.
“There's definitely kind of your typical like, oh, we're going for a walk, I'm going to feed you, but then there's a lot of narrating your day, you know, ‘Hey, I'm gonna brush my hair, I'm gonna read this book’. People seem to just like to talk to their pet about what's going on in their lives, and then of course they talk about what's going on in their pet's lives.”
At U of A, Doctor Emily Bray studies how people and animals interact. She says pet owners will tell you their animal friends are a positive force in their lives but scientific research on that is mixed.
So her research team joined up with psychology researchers. They convinced volunteers to wear voice recorders, but to avoid changing how the volunteers behaved, they did not tell them they wanted to listen in on what the people said to their pets.
They found even in a busy family with plenty of humans around, up to ten percent of the conversations were with the pets, and they could be as complex as a talk with a human.
There’s more to the study than pure curiosity.
Emily Bray says it could give us a deeper understanding of how pets —and the way we talk to them— can affect our mental health.
“So for example, people that might live alone except for with their pet and see again the impact, as you mentioned, not like on the pet but also on their own health and well-being, potentially even their cognitive outcomes, you know, are they using pets, um, as a substitute for sort of human social contact that might be lacking.”
