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Importance: The mental health crisis among college graduate students requires cost-effective interventions to support the increasing number of students experiencing negative mental health symptoms. Objective: To assess the effects of a canine-assisted intervention (CAI) on student well-being, including quality of life (QOL), stress, anxiety, occupational performance, and adjustment to the graduate college student role. Design: Random assignment to a treatment or control group. Setting: College campus. Participants: A total of 104 college student participants were randomly assigned to either the treatment (n = 53) or control (n = 51) condition. Intervention: Treatment consisted of 35-min weekly sessions over 6 wk. Outcomes and Measures: QOL, stress, anxiety, and occupational role. Results: An analysis of covariance revealed that, compared with participants in the control condition, participants who interacted with therapy dogs had significantly higher self-reports of QOL (p < .001) and decreased anxiety scores (p < .045). Within-subject paired t tests confirmed significant stress reductions for participants in the treatment condition (p < .000). No significant differences in self-reports of occupational performance or in adjustment to the graduate college student role were found. Conclusions and Relevance: These findings add to the body of literature attesting to the efficacy of CAIs in supporting student well-being and optimizing learning conditions. Moreover, this study demonstrated that graduate students in a professional program responded favorably to spending time with therapy dogs. Implications for CAIs and university mental health programming are discussed. What This Article Adds: A CAI may be a valuable tool for students and young adults experiencing mental health challenges, such as stress, anxiety, and decreased QOL.

Attending university can present a host of challenges for undergraduate students and the mental health of students has increasingly become a concern as students struggle to meet the demands of new ...

Researchers have claimed that canine-assisted interventions (CAIs) contribute significantly to bolstering participants' wellbeing, yet the mechanisms within interactions have received little empiri...

This study explored children’s perceptions of a canine-assisted social-emotional learning program developed within the framework of a canine therapy program at a mid-sized Canadian university. Data...

To date, research on university and college based canine-assisted interventions for post-secondary students have focused on identifying the effects of spending time with therapy dogs on the well-being of participants and, to a lesser extent, exploring the effects of canine-assisted interventions on therapy dogs as a means of safeguarding canine welfare. Little empirical attention has focused on understanding the experience of volunteer canine handlers – agents at the heart of the success of canine-assisted interventions. The aim of this exploratory research was to first capture the voice of these key stakeholders to better understand their experience as canine handler volunteers and second to provide preliminary insights into their well-being. Sixty volunteer handlers with varying volunteer experience with a canine therapy program at a mid-size Canadian university responded to a series of open-ended prompts related to their volunteer work and completed a battery of well-being measures. Qualitative findings revealed that most participants identified social benefits to volunteering for themselves (64%) and for their dog (55%). The perceived impact on students (33%) and the ability to help university students (36%) were the most rewarding aspects of volunteering. Though enticed to volunteer by qualities of the CAI program (36%), participant motivations to continue volunteering were predominantly associated with personal benefits of volunteering (44%). Most handlers reported no challenges associated with volunteering (73%) and described their dog as happy after sessions (71%). Participants commonly described good therapy dogs as relaxed, calm, and respectful (66%) and strong handlers as having good awareness of their dog (48%). Quantitative findings revealed volunteer handlers reported elevated levels of positive affect (p = < 0.001, d = 1.19), greater satisfaction with life (p = < 0.001, d = 0.85) and lower levels of avoidant attachment to their therapy dog (p = < 0.001, d = -1.16) when compared to normative samples. Implications for the governing of university and college based programs and handler well-being are discussed.

Despite the increasing popularity of canine-assisted interventions (CAIs) across a variety of contexts, and the demonstrated efficacy they have on stress reduction, there is a paucity of research exploring the implementation of such programs within the context of law enforcement. Policing is known to be an environment in which personnel experience elevated occupational stress. As stress can compromise the overall well-being of law-enforcement personnel and their ability to serve the public, it is important to understand how CAIs involving therapy dog visitation are experienced by the very individuals for whom they are intended to help. This qualitative study explored Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) members’ experiences of stress within a detachment and their perceptions of a CAI integrated within their workplace to support their well-being. Eight RCMP members (75% female, Mage = 49.21, SD = 6.12) from an urban RCMP detachment situated in the downtown core of a small city were interviewed. The interview focused on topics including members’ experiences of stress within the workplace, their perceptions of the effects of stress, resources and sources of support, and their experiences participating in a weekly CAI within their detachment. Results indicated that organizational stressors were identified more often than operational stressors; that members most commonly reported that stress rendered them more irritable and impacted their sleep, and that the most commonly reported coping mechanism and resource are exercise and medical services, respectively. In discussing the CAI, participants were overwhelmingly positive in their experiences of the program, and demonstrated support for having CAIs within the detachment setting. Discussion of the impact of the sessions demonstrated that participants found that the program served as a break from work, relieved their stress, improved their mood, and helped them to change perspectives. Participants also identified the role of the dogs within the program, which included their role as a social being. The findings from the current study contribute to better understanding of the lived experiences of stress within RCMP members and of CAIs within an applied setting.

Educators and parents alike have high expectations that adolescents behave prosocially and, within the context of schools, this is evident in curriculum grounded in social and emotional learning and in kindness-themed school-wide initiatives. Despite this emphasis on kindness, relatively little is empirically known about how adolescents enact kindness. To understand just how adolescents demonstrate kindness, a study of 191 ninth graders was conducted in which students were asked to plan and complete five kind acts. In addition to planning and doing acts of kindness, participants were asked to rate their face-to-face and online kindness, report the number of kind acts they completed, identify the recipients of their acts, and assess the quality of their kind acts. At post-test, participants’ self-ratings of both face-to-face and online kindness were significantly higher than their pre-test ratings. Only one third of participants completed all of their kind acts, most participants chose familiar others as the recipients of their kindness, and the bulk of participants rated their acts of kindness as medium quality on a low–medium–high scale. The kind acts done by participants reflected the themes of helping with chores, being respectful, complimenting/encouraging others, and giving objects or money. Implications for educators and parents are discussed.

Therapy animals are an important and growing support for students on university campuses; however, the stress experienced by dogs working in such programs has rarely been assessed. We assessed stress for 754 students, 40 handlers, and 40 dog participants in a canine therapy stress-reduction program hosted on a university campus. There was an overall significant decrease in handler and student stress and an increase in canine stress when observations of stress measured at home were compared to end-of-session stress. No change in canine stress was found when start-of-session stress was compared with end-of-session stress. For handlers whose initial self-reported stress was elevated, a correspondingly higher level of canine stress was identified at the end of the session. This finding suggests an emotional contagion or spillover model of stress whereby handlers—not student clients—negatively contribute to the affective experience of working therapy dogs.

This mixed-methods study explored how participation in an intensive course on human-animal relationships impacted preservice teachers’ views about human-animal welfare and advocacy and animal-focused curriculum. Participants were 25 undergraduate students (24 female; 1 male) following a teacher education pathway. Participants completed the Animal Rights Scale, and their insights on assigned readings were captured through weekly journal entries and responses to summative prompts. Participants reported feeling increased responsibility to advocate on behalf of nonhuman animals and greater support of animal welfare during the post-course (versus pre-course) assessment, and participants’ weekly and summative responses revealed some of the nuances and internal tensions in their thinking about integrating animal-focused curriculum as part of their future professional practice. As teachers play key roles fostering humane literacy and engaging young people with actual nature and animals, these findings have implications for both education and higher education curriculum and initiatives.

Law enforcement officers and staff are known to experience elevated workplace stress, largely due to their increased exposure to traumatic incidents. This results in individuals experiencing trauma themselves and resultant compromised physical and mental health. Law enforcement officers are also known to be reluctant help-seekers and to increase participation in programs to promote employee well-being, initiatives are increasingly integrated into the day-to-day work routine of employees. An intervention showing promise with health care providers and college students but not yet used with law enforcement officers and staff has been to provide individuals access to therapy dogs to reduce stress. Seven therapy dogs along with their handlers were brought to an urban police precinct for 90-minutes each week for 8 weeks. A total of 251 visits (56% staff, 43% officers, < 1% unidentified) to the dog station were made with the average duration of visits being 11 minutes. A visual analogue scale was used to assess participants pre-to-post differences in stress and a paired Wilcoxon signed-ranked test indicated a significant effect of the intervention with mean stress decreasing from pre-to-post visit. Findings are discussed within the context of canine-assisted intervention and law enforcement well-being.

The purpose of this study was to conduct an investigation of online information and criteria for potential canine-assisted intervention (CAI) teams to better understand current standards set by CAI programs. The field of animal-assisted interventions is burgeoning with CAI programs having moved beyond canine intervention teams visiting clients in a hospital setting to teams providing support to a range of clients in a variety of settings. In response to this surge in popularity of CAI programs, there is a need to better understand how both handlers and canines are deemed suitable for CAI work. The aim of this study was to investigate published online material for volunteer handlers and their canines as a means of identifying commonly sought information, screening criteria, and canine skills assessed across agencies. Over 320 programs were identified and 64 programs were randomly chosen to be coded for the analysis. A frequency distribution was used to identify most and least frequently occurring screening information, criteria, and assessed canine skills presented by CAI programs. Results indicated that the most common information requested of potential teams was basic information (e.g., human and canine name, canine breed), and the most frequently required criteria for potential teams included the team evaluation, canine age, and vaccine status. Our outcomes also identified the most commonly listed canine skills that are assessed in a team evaluation: accepting a friendly stranger, down, sit, and stay on cue, and reaction to a neutral dog. We found that requirements for handlers, such as handler skills, previous training, background checks, and ongoing monitoring, were lacking. Based on these findings, the authors recommend best practices for CAI program online screening. The findings from this study contribute to the emerging literature on CAI program screening procedures and hold implications for research involving CAI teams.

This paper profiles the different ways in which elementary and middle school students report on their acts of kindness and introduces the concept of quiet kindness, a socially and emotionally sophisticated form of kindness that does not draw attention to the initiator, where the recipient remains potentially unaware of the act, and the kind act is not likely acknowledged or reinforced by external agents. Examples from surveys of over 3,000 Canadian elementary and middle school students help illustrate how children enact kindness in school. The developmental implications of quiet kindness for children are discussed alongside implications for parents and educators.

Once used mostly in clinical settings such as hospitals and geriatric care centers, canine animal-assisted therapy programs have become increasingly commonplace on university campuses to reduce stress and support students’ social and emotional well-being. Researchers responding to the call for increased empirical rigor in studies assessing the effects of animal-assisted therapy and practitioners seeking to initiate well-being programs on campus can face challenges in accessing therapy dogs and their volunteer handlers. This article outlines how therapy canines and their handlers may be holistically assessed for participation in university-based initiatives and presents a model that includes the prescreening of volunteer handlers, training sessions for handlers, the use of multiple raters to assess canine temperament and behavior, the use of mock sessions, and the use of ongoing formative evaluation and feedback for handlers once they are accepted into the program.

Increasingly colleges and universities are offering canine therapy to help students de-stress as a means of supporting students' emotional health and mental well-being. Despite the popularity of such programs, there remains a dearth of research attesting to their benefits.Participants included 1960 students at a mid-size western Canadian University. The study's aims were to assess the stress-reducing effects of a weekly drop-in, canine-therapy program and to identify how long participants spent with therapy canines to reduce their stress.Demographic information was gathered, length of visit documented and a visual analog scale (VAS) was used to assess entry and exit self-reports of stress.Participants' self-reported stress levels were significantly lower after the canine therapy intervention. Participants spent an average of 35 min per session.This study supports the use of drop-in, canine therapy as a means of reducing university students' stress. The findings hold applied significance for both counseling and animal therapy practitioners regarding the dose intervention participants seek to reduce their stress.

The aim of this exploratory study was to examine fourth to eighth graders’ conceptualizations of kindness at school (i.e., their definition of kindness, an example of an act of kindness they have done, who they see as the most salient adult agent of kindness, and which location they deem that kindness happens most). To date, kindness research has focused predominantly on assessing the effects of being kind on student well-being and little is known about how students understand kindness and are kind in school. Across definitions and examples of kindness, the themes of helping others, showing respect, and encouraging others were prevalent. Teachers and principals were identified as the main adult agents of kindness; the classroom and outside/playground were identified as the two main kindness locations. Understanding how students conceptualize kindness within the school context holds implications for educators seeking to foster prosocial behavior among students.

University students with elevated stress levels are at risk for experiencing compromised mental health and for underperforming academically. In an effort to support student wellbeing, post-secondar...