Does Attachment with Pets and Animal Empathy really connect with Psychological Wellbeing? A Cross-sectional Study on Young Indian Adults

Abstract

Owning pet is found to have numerous health benefits in an individual’s life which is based on the reports of several research findings. It has been said that empathy orientation towards animals has a reciprocal relationship with pet attachment, which in turn affects one’s psychological wellbeing. Biologically, pet companionship or pet fondness helps an individual adult to cope with stress as hugging pets or cuddling pets are found to have a connection with the secretion of feel-good hormones; like oxytocin and serotonin. Different research had explored several benefits of having pets in home, where such unconditional bond with pets creates a sense of emotional and social bonding that tend to reduce the loneliness, increase happiness and overall, have found to impact one’s quality of life and wellbeing. The present research aim is to explore the association between pet attachment, animal empathy and psychological wellbeing among those individuals who have pets compared to those who do not have pets. Snowball and purposive sampling method were employed to recruit a group of 70 participants within the age range from 19 to 30 years; included both males and females. Among these 70 participants; 30 were pet owners and the rest of the 30 were non pet owners. These 70 participants filled out the assessments of pet attachment life impact questionnaire, animal empathy questionnaire and psychological wellbeing questionnaire respectively. Independent sample t-test, correlation and descriptive statistics were run for all the participants. The t-test result suggests that pet owners have a very strong attachment with pets and which significantly and positively associated with love, regulation and personal growth sub dimensions of pet attachment and life impact scale than  non-pet owners. Moreover, the group descriptive table also showed that, pet owners had a pattern of comparatively high scores in pet attachment life impact scale, animal empathy scale and psychological wellbeing scale than those who are non-pet owners. The result of correlation also revealed that, the sub dimension of pet attachment was positively correlated with the sub dimensions of psychological wellbeing. On the other hand, the overall psychological wellbeing of an individual person was strongly and positively correlated with the empathic feeling factor of animal empathy scale. Such significant relationships depicted the fact that, animal empathy leads to make an attachment with pets, that eventually make an individual to be a pet companion or pet owner; which improves one physical and mental wellbeing, help to reduce one’s emotional distress and anxiety, positively enhances one’s happiness and psychological wellbeing.