We Are Family: Viewing Pets as Family Members Improves Wellbeing

Publication Date

6-28-2019

Document Type

Article

Organizational Units

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology

Keywords

Anthropomorphism, Human–animal interaction, Pets, Social support, Wellbeing

Abstract

The current work investigated how viewing one’s pet as a family member improves wellbeing. We hypothesized that including pets in a key social ingroup (i.e., family) would increase ascriptions of socially supportive traits to these animals, enhancing their perceived ability to provide social support to owners, which in turn promotes owner wellbeing. Study 1 used a correlational design and showed positive relations between viewing one’s companion animal as a family member, greater perceptions of socially supportive traits, and better wellbeing as indexed by several measures of mental and physical health. Study 2 experimentally manipulated the extent to which participants viewed their pets as family members and found that inducing people to view companion animals as family members improved wellbeing. This study also provided evidence for the mediating role of socially supportive anthropomorphism, and it ruled out a mood-based alternative account. Pets can play an important role in providing social support that can improve people’s mental and physical health, and the processes underlying how animals can be included in people’s most important ingroup shed light on the psychology underlying how group memberships affect perceptions of humanity.

Copyright Date

6-28-2019

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Rights Holder

International Society for Anthrozoology

Provenance

Received from CHORUS

Language

English (eng)

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the International Society for Anthrozoology. User is responsible for all copyright compliance. This article was originally published as:

McConnell, A. R., Lloyd, E. P., & Humphrey, B. T. (2019). We are family: Viewing pets as family members improves wellbeing. Anthrozoös, 32(4), 459-470. https://doi.org/10.1080/08927936.2019.1621516

Publication Title

Anthrozoös

Volume

32

Issue

4

First Page

459

Last Page

470

ISSN

1753-0377

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