EXPERIENCE AND EVOLUTION: FINDING MEANING AT THE INTERSECTION OF NATURE AND NURTURE

From bass guitars and touchscreen games for dogs to bonobo hands and gray mouse lemur reproduction, this thesis spans a breadth of topics and seeks to examine the influences of nature and nurture on our understanding of the world around us. Forms of writing range from personal essays to more straightforward science news stories. Primatology, psychology, and evolutionary biology play a featured role in most works

Glucocorticoid response to naturalistic interactions between children and dogs

Although research has shown that pets appear to provide certain types of social support to children, little is known about the physiological bases of these effects, especially in naturalistic contexts. In this study, we investigated the effect of free-form interactions between children (ages 8–10 years) and dogs on salivary cortisol concentrations in both species. We further investigated the role of the child-dog relationship by comparing interactions with the child's pet dog to interactions with an unfamiliar dog or a nonsocial control condition, and modeled associations between survey measures of the human-animal bond and children's physiological responses. In both children and dogs, salivary cortisol decreased from pre- to post-interaction; the effect was strongest for children interacting with an unfamiliar dog (compared to their pet dog) and for the pet dogs (compared to the unfamiliar dog). We found minimal evidence for associations between cortisol output and behaviors coded from video, but children scoring higher on survey measures of the human-animal bond exhibited the greatest reductions in cortisol when interacting with dogs. Self-reported loneliness was not related to cortisol or the human-animal bond, but measures of both loneliness and the human-animal bond were higher among children who participated after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, relative to those who participated before the pandemic. This study builds on previous work that investigated potential stress-buffering effects of human-animal interaction during explicit stressors and demonstrates important physiological correlates of naturalistic interactions between children and dogs, similar to those that occur in daily life.12 month embargo; first published 13 March 2024This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]