Allen McConnell is University Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Miami University. His research examines how relationships with family and pets affect health and well-being, how people decode others’ nonverbal displays, and how self-nature representations influence pro-environmental action with this work supported over the years by National Institutes of Health (NICHD and NIMH) and National Science Foundation grants. His Social Self blog at Psychology Today receives more than 10K unique views per post.
Episode Description
Social media is always awash in pet videos and images, but since the COVID lockdowns it seems as though there is even more pet content to be found online as cats invade video conferences and dogs beg for even more walks. There are sometimes even calls in spaces such as Twitter for people to share pet images when someone’s having a bad day. The connection between pets and wellness is one of the focuses of this episode of Stats and Stories, with guest Allen McConnell.
+Timestamps
How did you start studying pets? (1:25)
Ways pets improve health (3:20)
How do you do control groups when studying pet ownership? (5:40)
What about the pets that cause stress? (8:15)
Pets relationship with media (9:50)
How does this fit into social/positive psychology? (12:12)
How do you feel about the reporting around your work? (13:40)
Divisions in pet ownership and how people view pets (16:10)
Is there data like this around the world? (19:47)
Nature’s impact on mental health (21:20)
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington: Social media is always awash in pet videos and images, but since the COVID lockdowns it seems as though there is even more pet content to be found online as cats invade video conferences and dogs beg for even more walks. There are sometimes even calls in spaces such as Twitter for people to share pet images when someone’s having a bad day. The connection between pets and wellness is one of the focuses of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I’m Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University’s Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me are regular panelists John Bailer, Chair of Miami’s Statistics Department and Richard Campbell, former Chair of Media, Journalism and Film. Our guest today is Allen McConnell. McConnell is a University distinguished professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Miami University. Over the years his work has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation and one of his areas of research expertise is how relationships with family and pets affect health and wellbeing. Allen thank you so much for being here.
Allen McConnell: Thanks, Rosemary, glad to be here.
Pennington: So, I’ve been looking at a couple of your papers, looking at pets and wellness and the connection with wellness for families. How did pets become something that you wanted to research?
McConnell: You know, it was just kind of an accident actually. Several years ago I was working with one of my grad students, Christina Brown, and we were setting self-concepts and one thing that we just kind of noticed in some of the analyses that we were doing is that a lot of people- and these were a lot of undergrads at Miami, but people in the community as well, would frequently mention that among their different self-identities, whether that was like a parental self or an athlete self, they would often mention pet owner self, and we just did a really quick correlation and found that as people were more likely to mention having a pet owner self that their well-being was greater. So we were just in the process of writing a chapter and I just told Christina just go out and find the citation for that and tell – you know, we’ll just put it in our chapter and say we see the same thing and she went out and she came back and she’s like the data aren’t out there. Like, we know that people who have lots of health challenges benefit from pets, whether that’s the elderly people who are HIV positive- but there really was no studies in the psychological literature looking at how everyday pet owners benefit from pets, and that’s kind of what launched us into the research. I mean at the time I didn’t have a pet. I was pretty agnostic on the question, but really it just came out of our self-research and that’s kind of what led to the last 15 years of work that we’ve done.
Richard Campbell: Hey Allen, can you talk a little bit about some of the ways that pets improve health; some specific ways?
McConnell: Sure. So, we’ve done a number of types of studies. Some of them have been correlational nature. So for example, in one of our studies we looked at people who went to the animal adoption foundation, which is outside of Ross, so if you’re ever driving up to Oxford up 27 from Cincinnati you would see that on the right side as you’re going up. We looked at people one summer who were coming in and looking at the prospect of adopting a pet, you know a dog or a cat primarily there, and then we tracked people two months later who had adopted and we found from that study that two months after adoption, people’s depression was significantly lower having adopted the pet compared to when they came in to look at the pets originally. So that’s one example of sort of a correlational study that we’ve done. You know, we can’t randomly assign people to adopt a pet or not adopt a pet. So that gives us a way to look at that, those types of studies. We’ve looked at differences between pet owners and non-pet owners and find a whole host of differences in terms of health, self-esteem, even more, positive personality characteristics of people who adopt and have pets or companion animals. They tend to be more extroverted, they tend to be more conscientious, and both of those are really important personality characteristics of happy, successful, well-adjusted people. So, we have a variety of correlational studies like that and we’ve also done experimental studies in the lab and as a scientist, those are the ones I find most satisfying.
John Bailer: I almost hate to say this but when you said you were agnostic on the topic I thought that must mean you don’t believe in dog. [Laughter] I’m sorry.
McConnell: So my wife and I actually adopted a rescue dog last year so that- I kind of got on the dog train because I kind of thought you know if I don’t believe my own data then I’m kind of a fraud.
Bailer: So now you do believe in dog?
McConnell: Yes.
Campbell: Are you less depressed now?
McConnell: Definitely, I think it’s helping a lot with COVID-19 right now.
[Laughter]
Bailer: You know I’m really interested in the kind of studies that you’ve been doing and how you formalize the inquiry into this. You know, one thing that you were saying is it’s hard to randomize someone into saying I’m going to put a dog or a cat into your life. But that you could be studying people that were at a sort of similar place before they acquired this. I mean there’s sort of this whole issue of could you do I don’t know case-control study where you do match of people the case, you know. People with depression, people without depression, you know kind of the odds of pet ownership or these designs that come out of health inquiry and public health models. The other thing is this whole issue of causal inference is another thing that would come up when you think about the effects of something like pet ownership. Just general question.
McConnell: Yeah, that’s a good question, John. So what we- so for example, if I go back to the AAF study where we looked at depression down the road, we were able to make comparisons so when people came into the pet shelter we knew at that moment that there were some differences between the adopters and the non-adopters in terms of wellbeing, self-esteem, depression, stress-related illnesses, we were out those kinds of antecedent factors as well. You know that still doesn’t mean that the people who chose to adopt were maybe not on a different sort of psychological or financial or socioeconomic trajectory, so there’s a lot of things we still can’t control for, but in a lot of our studies, we’ve been able to co-vary out those individual differences that might account for some things that might lead to conclusion, but you know it’s always an open matter. There’s a really great study that was done like almost 15 years ago by this research her at City of Buffalo Karen Allen where they actually did do the random assignments conditions. They had a bunch of stockbrokers in New York City, I think the study was done back in 2001 or something like that, and they got them all to agree to consider adopting a pet and then based on a random assignment they gave some of them a pet and others were just weight listed control and they show differences between those two groups.
Pennington: Oh wow.
McConnell: I don’t think the stockbrokers made more money, but they were happier.
[Laughter]
Campbell: So, Allen, we have two rescue dogs and three cats and so I loved reading about your research. So, what I want to know is what you do about pets that cause stress.
[Laughter]
Campbell: So, I have a dog like if it starts storming in a little bit she’s going to be in here and she’s 65 pounds and she’s going to want to be in my lap. So does the stress relief that I get from my pets, is that undercut by the amount of stress that some pets can cause?
McConnell: I think it would be foolish to say that pets are a panacea. Obviously pets require care they require physical exertion, they require money, so I don’t think that pets are always a positive development. Our data shows on average they are, but that’s not a given. So I think that there are probably some more needier animals, people who are older maybe are at greater risk of having some sort of physical – if you’re walking your dog on an icy sidewalk, that may not be the best situation. But we also know from a lot of data, you know, we know this from human relationships- and to the same extent for pets as well- that being needed is a really valuable thing psychologically. If you feel like you can be of service to your dog- so if your dog comes in and is super nervous in a few minutes and you feel like you’re helping to calm the dog, then that gives you a real sense of contribution to this thing that you care about. So even though that might require energy in a stressful pet, you’re probably going to get benefits out of that.
Pennington: We’ve had Jessica Myrick, who is a researcher at Penn State and does research on parasocial interactions with animals via media. So, she, oh gosh what is it? Ignoble honoree for her cat study a couple of years ago, which found that if you watch cat videos at work and then go back to work you’re a bit more productive because you’re sort of decompressing by watching the cat video. I wonder if you have done any work looking at people’s relationships with animals via social media and whether you have found anything similar to what you found like the family situations.
McConnell: So, a couple of ways to respond to that. one of them is- I’d mentioned my friend Christina Brown one of my- she got her Ph.D. at Miami- years later we did a follow-up study where what we looked at was individual differences and people’s propensity to project anthropomorphism. So, anthropomorphism is when we ascribe human-like socially supported traits to nonhuman entities. So if I think that my dog Leo is considerate and thoughtful and concerned about me, even though that’s, you know, completely in my head and I’m projecting those qualities onto the dog, that helps me build a higher-quality relationship with an animal compared to thinking that my dog doesn’t have those capacities. So, what we did was we looked at- we measured people’s propensity to engage in anthropomorphism. So, we knew some people were much higher in that trait than others.
Pennington: I would be one of those people.
McConnell: And then we had people write about a time when they were socially rejected. So, this was an experimental induction of a negative social experience, and then what we had people do in our study was just view slides of photos of dogs and cats and animals. They just popped up on the screen for 8 seconds and they saw those for about four minutes, and then afterward we measured peoples well-being at the end of the study, and what we found was that viewing the slides was helpful to people but especially for the people who were prone to engage in anthropomorphism. So, if you’re someone who tends to project those kinds of qualities onto animals, just looking at them- you’re not interacting with them, they’re two-dimensional images on a computer monitor, even those have a positive effect on people.
Bailer: So, this is part of, would you say the general psychology class called positive psychology? Is that fair to describe this? Or can you help me understand how this fit in, in terms of the broader picture? You’re a social psychologist, right?
McConnell: Yes, that’s correct.
Bailer: So, within the scope of kind of the practice of social psychology how does this type of work plugin?
McConnell: Well, that’s a great question. I think if you put 20 psychologists in a room and asked them to define positive psychology you’ll get forty different definitions. But that being said I think it is part of that positive psychology space where I think a lot of psychology, especially more clinical psychology where you look at psychological dysfunction, but a lot of psychology is really focused on what causes problems? What are judgment and decision-making potholes? What are the situations where people do maladaptive things? So, in my view positive psychology is looking at the beneficial psychological consequences of a variety of experiences. So, in our lab we focus primarily on pets we also focus on the environment and contact with nature and we look at things like positive emotions, well-being. So, a bunch of outcomes for social behavior; outcomes that are positive because they’re benefitting the individual, they’re benefitting the larger social collectives, and often those are being driven by positive emotions, a sense of belonging, and things like that.
Pennington: You’re listening to Stats and Stories and today we’re talking to Miami University’s Allen McConnell. Allen, you are talking about how you’re sort of situated in this realm of positive psychology and I am coming out of a journalism background and Richard as well, and you know we don’t always- journalists don’t always have a great track record when it comes to covering stories about research. Whether it’s medical or otherwise and I wonder if you would be willing to share what you thought was good reporting relating to maybe your work, and maybe an example of what was not so good reporting?
McConnell: Wow, so in full disclosure, I was a journalism minor as an undergrad and former editor at my college newspaper at the University of Cincinnati and also I’ve been an editor of journals so my journalism is fallowed me all the way through and even though I’m sure sometimes my emails could use a lot more terseness to my faculty, I think it’s benefitted me. That’s a really tough question, I don’t know if any particular ones stand out. I think it- I can’t predict it in advance. I did a spot with Huffington Post about a year ago and the questions were just really really amazing like they really were interested in what are your control groups? How are you establishing this? And they asked a lot of great questions like what do you think are the limits of this? What do you think are the mechanisms underlying this? Have you done mediation analyses? So they were really breaking it down like a scientist and this was somebody who had a psychology background but just kind of thought about things in a systematic way, and conversely, the ones where the interviews fall apart are either when people have- they’re kind of interested in explaining something about themselves, so like you know my aunt is a crazy cat woman, why is that the case? That’s their agenda and I get those sorts of motivation, but it doesn’t necessarily make for a great interview, I would say.
Bailer: I’m glad he didn’t give Stats and Stories as his bad example. I was on pins and needles.
McConnell: There’s still time John.
Campbell: That’s right. So, Allen just historically- and I’m just talking about my sort of personal relationship with pets and-
Bailer: Oh, here he goes. The crazy cat lady part of the story.
Campbell: Well I’m going to put this in history. So, when I grew up you know my mom grew up in the depression she’s 94, we never had pets. We had five kids, none of the families that we grew up- big catholic families with eight kids my aunt had 13 kids, nobody had cats and dogs, and I asked mom once- and even to this day, she doesn’t sort of get it, but she does say when we were growing up in the ’50s was a luxury and if you grew up in the depression, and you had five kids there was no room for a pet. Have you incorporated any of these generational shifts in any of your work? That’s just something that I find curious. All of mom’s children, by the way, have pets today, multiple pets. So, we’ve gotten back at her for being denied pets when we were children.
McConnell: Nice, I’m sure she appreciates that. that’s a great question Richard and the short answer is no but I think there’s a couple of things that I find interesting there. One is that so for a number of years I was an instructor in the Earth Expeditions Program at Miami, so I’ve been to paces teaching conservation in places like Belize, India, you know places where you know the mean socioeconomic level of the population is much much lower, and if you look in countries like that, like India for example, it’s interesting because a lot of people have a pet per se, but it’s not a pet like we think about it in kind of contemporary upper-middle-class North America where Fido or Fluffy lives in the house and eats fancy cat food or things like that, or gets lots of new chew toys. But there might be like a neighborhood dog that bounces around between four or five different homes in a small village but each family that helps to care for that dog- maybe they leave scraps out every other day, or they’ll play and kick a ball around and play with the dog for a little bit. Each one of those families, at least the ones that I have met personally view that pet as a really important fixture in their household, but it’s just not the same as we think about that here in the United States where it’s like it belongs to one household, it stays in the house. The second part of that is that the functionality of that varies a lot even in our own culture. So again I think there is a sort of story about how you know modern upper-middle-class privilege people have these pets, but you know I also grew up on a farm, and you know in that farm setting most of our animals were outdoors. We had two cats and their job was to catch mice in the barn. My best friend has two dogs that are outside primarily for protection and you know they have a dog house he loves the dogs dearly but they’re not home dogs they are doghouse dogs, so I think you know within our culture we see a lot of variability in how people approach pets and you know I don’t necessarily think that the bonds are different, they’re just serving different sorts of ends.
Campbell: In my house, our cats are charged with catching mice in the house. And they’re good at it too.
McConnell: No judgment about your house having mice though. [Laughter]
Campbell: We live in the woods.
McConnell: Ah, fair enough.
Bailer: So, I’m curious, you’ve talked about the benefits such as self-esteem and this idea of more involved, more fitness, less loneliness, less fearfulness, kind of other positive components as well. These are studies predominantly in the U.S. I assume and I’m just curious, do you know of research that sees generalizability to other cultures around the world this type of pet positive impact of engagement with pets?
McConnell: You know, there’s not enough data I think that would make me comfortable with saying it’s that pervasive. So, there are lots of countries, Brazil has like 30 million dogs. Japan has like nine million cats. So, you can find particular cultures where pet ownership is pretty high and in those cultures. There’s been evidence showing that pets seem to have these positive benefits, but again there’s so much homogeneity within those cultures that, and I think about the U.S. as a third culture where I don’t necessarily know how comfortable I would be with saying it as just a blanket sort of thing. I would say though that what we get out of the belongingness and what we get out of the social connection piece that we see in pets looks so similar to what we see that people get out of connections with people. So, to the extent that those are some of the mechanisms in different cultures, I think the benefits and the functionality would be the same.
Bailer: So I was going to ask you about kind of some of the work that you and your colleagues have done in terms of the environment and thinking about conservation and the- you know, as we were talking here remotely, all of us in our separate homes and environments the sense of isolation is something that you’ve talked about the benefit of pets and some of the positive components of that, you’ve also- one aspect of your lab is looking at what’s going on in terms of your self-nature representation and your relationship with that. can you talk a little bit about the work that you’ve done there and some of the benefits that you’ve identified in terms of the interactions with nature?
McConnell: Yeah, thanks. Yes this again is great research that my grad students have been really central and Tyler Jacobs is one of them, and we’ve been looking at- again a lot of the research that I do whether it’s the pets or the nature or the family stuff is all about thinking about the self-concept and thinking about how people build on that. And you know, it goes without saying that one of the most existential crises that we’re facing as a species is global warming. And you know, even if you have even some doubts about that, I don’t think anybody is pro-pollution or you know pro-wasting natural materials so there’s just a lot of important stuff that we need to do there. And I am always struck by the fact that people identify issues like global warming as something that is very important to them personally, yet people don’t ever seem to be motivated to do anything about it. People will say I care a lot about the environment, but they still drive a big honking SUV that gets 20 miles to the gallon or they refuse to carpool to work because it would be a little bit inconvenient. Or there’s just so many ways that people could do something and obviously, their choices with elected officials reflect that as well. So, I think what we’ve been trying to do is figure out can we harness the self in some sort of way to amp up the motivations that people have to make them more connected to environmental causes. So, the basic approach we’ve been trying to do is kind of twofold. One is trying to get people to incorporate their sense of nature more into their self-concept, so basically can you make nature a bigger part of who you are as a person. And secondly, we’ve also been trying to find ways to make people feel like nature is relatively bigger than they are. So basically if you have this great grandiose sense of self and you’re this narcissist who thinks that you’re God’s gift to everything then you don’t really feel like you should have a role to sacrifice others, to benefit plants to benefit animals. So, what we’re trying to do is shrink people’s sense of self but to get greater overlap between their sense of self and nature. So that’s the sort of two-pronged approach that we’ve been taking in a lot of our research.
Bailer: And how is that going? Have you found success? How would you measure success in that kind of work?
McConnell: Well, we’ve got a number of papers that are under review right now. We have a third revised paper so I guess if it gets published that would be a success and if it gets rejected that will be non-success. But this is work that we’ve really just been doing in the last five years. So, we’ve got three papers where we’ve been looking at things like can we get pledges to be more powerful and more effective. This actually started from a senior thesis project in my lab a few years ago. One of our students, Lauren Gottschalk, got us started down this path about what is it that makes a pledge powerful? How can we use psychology to make someone who might sign a pledge be more likely to follow up on that pledge? So, we’ve taken that sort of track, we’ve taken the self-nature representation track. And the third area that we’ve been focusing on to kind of tie it back to positive emotions is what’s called self-transcendent emotions. So, these are emotions that are more focused on others. It’s not things like pride that would be more about an individual’s sense of accomplishment, but it’s a sense of awe, you know that kind of sense that you’re looking at a vista, you’re like this is amazing this large- you know the Grand Canyon is a place that seems to trigger on everybody. You look at this amazing vista and you’re like I’m such a grain of dust compared to this. So those sorts of positive emotional experiences are really tied into prosocial behavior and pro-environmental behavior in particular.
Pennington: Well Allen, that’s all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories, thank you so much for being here.
McConnell: Oh, my pleasure.
Bailer: Thanks, Allen.
Pennington: Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter or Apple podcasts or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program you can send your emails to statsandstories@miamiioh.edu or check us out at Statsandstories.net and be sure to join us for future editions of Stats and Stories where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.